Lily and Zoe taught their first London Lit Lab course together in June 2016. Since then, so much has changed, but the fundamentals of LLL have stayed the same. To celebrate five years of partnership, teaching, learning and writing, Ennis Welbourne interviewed Lily and Zoe, beginning at the very beginning…
How did you meet?
The Critique Group
Lily: We met in a writer’s front room: a member of the North London Writers’ critique group, which we were both a part of. Actually, I was part of it and then you joined, Zoe. Everyone was very excited about you, a new writer who was pushing boundaries. I remember the first time she submitted her writing to be critiqued and they all loved it – which was very unusual for the group. They were fierce.
Zoe: I joined because I needed feedback on my short story collection, and this group wasn’t afraid to say what they didn’t like—nothing was off the table.
Lily: We bonded over cigarettes. We’d sometimes sit in the garden and escape the critics with a fag! This was how we became friends. We liked each other’s work, and we appreciated the kindness in our personal approach, but we also started to chat about our lives, our relationships, our cats… and realised we had an affinity there as well.
How did the business get started?
Reshaping Two Lives
Zoe: We talked a lot about our fears and worries about how to earn a living as writers, and one evening we were out in a pub in Fitzrovia with Julia Bell and some other people. It must have been after an event. Julia convinced us that there was a future in independent teaching. I think one of the main universities had cut back on their evening courses, and Julia alerted us to a gap in the market. She encouraged us to set up a partnership, offering courses at affordable prices. With all her enthusiasm, she made it sound easy. If she hadn’t put so much faith in us that night, none of this would have happened.
Lily: It was a crazy idea, but we were both at a point in our lives when we needed to find something sustainable to enable us to write but also earn enough to survive. I was going through a marriage separation and had two young children, and you were thinking of leaving your job.
Zoe: I had dropped my hours working for the council, with an aim to quit, and we were both interested in teaching. It was clearly not possible to waltz into a university and land a job, and it was a risk to rely solely on writing to survive. Everything was up in the air.
Lily: I remember walking away from the pub that night feeling really anxious about how we were going to make a living. The leap from where we were at that point – both studying for PhDs with very little income from teaching, to earning enough to support our writing felt impossible. But we kind of just did it! Though it did take quite a long time.
Zoe: It was great that we were both suddenly chucked into a different-shaped life while also feeling a little bit scared, because this is what motivated us. The first six months of organisational toil, setting up the website, figuring out where we could teach, how to let people know we had courses running, designing them, teaching together. The whole thing took so much more time than either of us imagined. If I hadn’t been doing it with you, I would have just quit, because it felt too scary, too much. But we both really needed it to work. So, we hammered at it. We did thousands of hours of work in our first year, and we maybe even made a tiny dribble of money.
Learning Period
Lily: It was a slow burn, but we managed to use these really lovely venues in those early days. The first course we ran was in my friend’s café in Shoreditch. It was full of character and gave our courses a bit of an edge. It was freezing in the winter, do you remember?
Zoe: We picked beautiful cakes and fruit from Leila’s shop next door, not realising how much they might cost us—feeding people these beautiful Spanish almond cakes and bowls of cherries. It was all very luscious and Instagrammable, even though we weren’t doing that sort of thing then! It was atmospheric and down to earth. I know from experience that institutional classrooms aren’t very creative spaces. But being in a place where there was a collection of weird objects and oddly-shaped spoons on the wall, I definitely felt more at home. It was sociable and a little more like a gaggle of writers getting together, rather than us sitting at the front being teachers at a school.
Lily: Yes. When everyone arrived, we made them all a cup of tea. It was nerve wracking in those early months. But we grew and developed as writers, which you inevitably do. Teaching teaches you about writing; you’re reading a lot more, you’re writing lesson plans, you’re having to think about how to translate that stuff to people, and then you’re reading their work. This helped me know myself better as a writer. My other revelation was also through Julia Bell around this time, as she encouraged me to write creative nonfiction. When I started getting stuff published again after kids and a bit of a hiatus, it felt like the right path for me.
Zoe: We established our little niches, I suppose, didn’t we? Yours became more about memoir and creative nonfiction and mine was more about folky, fantastical writing.
How has togetherness helped?
Mutual Support
Lily: We’ve not had one argument or got annoyed at each other because we both understand and also accommodate each other’s slightly chaotic self-employed lives. We are very grateful for what we offer each other and realise we’ve landed something that’s actually really special.
Zoe: We might be writers and teachers, but we think differently. There are things that fall to each of us naturally. I love having to share making decisions with you, because I know you will come at it from a different angle. It’s refreshing. There’s something profoundly reassuring about sharing responsibility with another person you trust. Being solely responsible would have made this whole thing so much more stressful. If you know there is going to be someone there with you after a teaching session, who you can laugh with about the mistakes made and the moments your mind went blank, then those moments don’t matter as much.
Contrasting Views on Writing
Lily: I have always been much more interested in realist writing I suppose, and you’ve just got this amazing imagination. You’re able to step into that other world that you might have invented, with no perceived effort at all, whereas I find all that a bit frightening. I kind of want to keep my feet on the ground. But this has made us really complimentary. Before Covid, when we were teaching live, and you did your bit in class, it just felt very different from what I offered and very surprising. There was a shift in energy, and I think that was a really lovely quality that we brought to the classroom.
Zoe: And we could disagree with each other as well. I don’t like the idea that people are writing down what I say, as if this is the one way to do something. I’m constantly hedging and saying, ‘just because I’m saying this, doesn’t mean it’s the only way’. But I don’t think it always sinks in. Some people want the code, they want the key. The fact that you and I openly say to each other that we think differently about it is really good. I think it is also more enjoyable for us because then we aren’t just there reading a list of instructions, it is more like a conversation.
How do you remain invested?
Inventing Your Own Content
Zoe: I think because we’re inventing our own courses, we’ve ended up teaching what we’re really interested in. You’re constantly reading things, Lily, that will feed into discussions that happen on your creative nonfiction courses, and I’m inevitably doing the same with fantastical fiction. It means that the people who come on the course are often surprised by how engaged we are with the material itself. People say, ‘oh you’re so enthusiastic about this, I couldn’t help but be enthusiastic too.’ That’s really important. As soon as I’m sick of my folk-tales course I’ll stop teaching it!
Lily: I totally agree. If you’re really present and you really care as a teacher, people get excited and talk more as a result. It’s another reason why it’s such a relief to give other specialist topics, like Writing for Children, or Plotting a Page-Turner, to other tutors to teach. I would feel like a bit of an imposter if I tried to do a session on a genre or type of writing I wasn’t familiar with.
How are your courses different?
Community
Lily: I think one thing that we do really well, that we do naturally, is build a community. We have a lot of people who come back and enroll on another of our courses. Some even attend the same course twice! I think this is because the two of us are very present and involved. There are no pre-recorded lessons, and all our teachers give feedback, which seems to be quite unique in online creative writing courses. We hold the space. We put more work and time in because it matters, because it’s our little business. I think that does have a lot to do with it, and it’s something we don’t want to lose as we expand.
Zoe: I can’t see myself ever not wanting to teach. There’s something so delightful about someone coming back to you and saying, ‘this story I wrote on your course is my first publication’ or ‘I just had that penny-dropping moment and realized how to fix this other piece of writing that I didn’t even bring’. There’s this combination of presence and enthusiasm, a kind of creative energy that everyone benefits from. When I come out of workshops after being in front of a group of people for about six hours, I get this unbelievable high. A little later, I feel as though I’ve had all the blood removed from my body and replaced with dishwater. I’ve given every ounce of energy I have. It’s deeply satisfying. Especially when someone tells you afterwards that they’ve changed somehow through the process. I do find myself genuinely invested in the people who come on my courses. I assumed that after five years I would be fully jaded and I’d be trotting out my lessons, thinking, ‘here we go, another batch’, and it’s not like that at all. I really care. I hope that shows.
Never Superior or Competitive
Zoe: I hope that I never position myself as a superior to the people I am teaching. I think not acting as if you’re the goddess of all writing knowledge, and your students are your acolytes, is really important. We are all writers; we’ll all succeed and fail at times with our work.
Lily: Yes, and some writing courses are much more competitive in their approach.
Zoe: Who gets the biggest advance, who gets the big splash book, which of the people who’ve been on the course this year are going to be the bestsellers? This disregards the fact that a lot of people come on writing courses as a gift to themselves, because they love the creative process. I really want to nurture that. It isn’t just about having your book on the shelf.
Lily: If you want to be a writer, you’ve got to want to be a writer. To live and breathe it. It’s got to be your whole life. Well, maybe not your whole life, but perhaps your purpose. Publication is just the icing on the cake. It comes after a whole load of really hard work and a lot of good luck as well.
Why is it important to go on a writing course?
Imagining Your Success Through Others
Zoe: That first moment when somebody tells you that what you’ve written is good, and you can totally do it, is really important. I remember the first time someone said that to me, and sounded like they meant it. I ran out of that writing course and phoned my mum! It’s important to remind people that the thing that matters to them is worth doing. Even if they think it’s this embarrassing hobby that they can never tell their friends about.
Lily: If you’re in a group, and you’re meeting every week to talk about publication, somehow, something happens to the students. They start to envisage themselves as being published. The course gives them that confidence. Then they step out into the world with a sense of authority. Creativity is such a strange sort of osmosis, isn’t it? You can’t necessarily pinpoint what it is that you do, but it’s something about the combination of the right energy, the right group. The right sort of holding of that group, which starts to get results. People enjoy it! And enjoyment and happiness are a great fuel for creativity and for success.
What are you both up to now?
Lily and Zoe are both in the process of getting a book published in 2022 with Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Bloomsbury respectively), while finishing their PhDs. At the moment, they are gearing up for the publication of their recovery anthology, A Wild and Precious Life (Unbound), in May 2021
Zoe Gilbert
I freely admit that when it comes to working on my PhD, I struggle to prioritise writing critical theory over writing fiction! Whereas my next book – Mischief Acts, my second novel – is on the home run. I’m waiting for a cover design, copy edits and illustrations. Like my first book, this one has maps, and I don’t know what that says about what I’m writing! I’m quite excited, but I switched editors between books, so it’s also slightly nerve-wracking. It will have been a two-year process from selling the book to its publication. It initially felt like a very long time, but it feels helpful now, and I’m enjoying the fact that the text itself is getting further and further away from my heart, before it has to enter the world.
On the other hand, it’s been three years since we started our recovery anthology, A Wild and Precious Life, and I think I’m still adjusting to the fact that this is finally happening. It’s such a pleasure to have this book coming out as editors, rather than writers, promoting a book that is full of other people’s writing! When that book is in our hands, we will finally exhale, and I’ll really be able to think about these pieces of work being out in the world.
Lily Dunn
The anthology came from a really good place. It’s a labour of love, definitely. It is a community-based project but it’s also going to be reviewed, then go on a kind of online book tour, which is frightening and really exciting at the same time.
In terms of my own work, I recently pitched an article idea to my editor at Aeon which I’d written very quickly, while being pushed and pulled in all directions – trying to get back into my PhD, after just delivering the second draft of my memoir. They’re usually very hard to please, but she was like, ‘I love it, I love it’. I sometimes have to stop and reflect – and think: ‘My God, I’ve come so far!’ Just in the last, I suppose, three years.
I wrote another novel after my first that didn’t get published. When that happens to you, you have to really face yourself. Ask yourself the question, am I doing this right? Is this really what I should put my energies into? But I knew I would never give up. It was just a matter of shifting the lens slightly. When I moved into non-fiction, I realized that actually this was a much stronger area for me. Once I made that decision, things started to fall into place. It’s kind of what we were saying about our business working. When it’s right, it starts to flow. Without sounding like a complete hippy, the energy is right.
Now, I feel really excited about where things are going. I’ve got this memoir coming out. We’ll soon have the title and we’ll choose a cover, and I’ll be on the treadmill that Zoe is on with hers. It feels massive. I mean, this will be my first book since 2007. It’s been quite a while since I’ve had something to show for all that hard work. So, I’m really excited about that, but also I’m quite scared because it’s obviously a very personal story. But because publication takes so long, I’ll have enough time to detach from it and see it as something over there, as Zoe said, further away from my heart.
Final Thoughts
Zoe: If you don’t love the process and if you’re not doing it for the writing itself, you’re more vulnerable. There is a lot of luck involved in the publishing side of being a writer, so if you are relying solely on reviews and sales to measure your worth, it can all go horribly wrong. People who say things like, ‘you are only as good as your last book’, are talking rubbish. You have to be your own little writer-therapist, and remind yourself that it’s what you write next that matters.
Lily: Undoubtedly, there will be storms to weather, but we will do it together. Because it’s not a competition and we will be here, supporting each other.