Running a literary society: the Katherine Mansfield Society

If you have a favourite author, you may like to consider getting together with other like-minded people in order to establish a literary society, if one does not already exist. This is exactly what happened in 2008 with a group of KM scholars coming together, frustrated that there was no literary society to join. A literary society opens up all sorts of exciting collaborative opportunities for its members, and particularly the steering committee. Our first venture was to set up a website so we could start advertising ourselves - it is now the world’s largest hub for information on KM, attracting $NZ 20 000 of funding to date. We set up an annual literary journal, taken up by Edinburgh University Press in 2009, together with a newsletter, sent out to members 3 times a year. The committee is involved in all aspects of editing these publications and many of our members contribute regularly. We discovered that Dame Jacqueline Wilson, the children’s author, was a KM devotee; we contacted her and she is now our President, attending as many society events as she can. A literary society offers many different potential avenues for publication and for enhancing your CV, as we shall be demonstrating in this session