Description: Tenter Hook
tenter hook (1) university of leeds (1) ba english literature and creative writing (1) new writing (1)
T enterhooks (or ‘tenter-hooks’) were ever-present in Leeds during the city’s cloth-making boom. Wet woollen cloth was hung on hooks attached to wooden frames called ‘tenters’ in order to prevent it from shrinking as it dried. In the eighteenth century, the fields along the River Aire were lined with tenter frames, and to this day we have Tenter Hill and Tenter Lane . According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘tenterhook’ is associated with stretching, straining, unsettling, and creating suspense
It’s not just readers who are ‘on tenterhooks’ – writers experience this feeling as well. To study Creative Writing is to be perpetually ‘on tenter-hooks’ – whether it’s creative strain from reaching for a good idea or the suspense of waiting for feedback on a new piece of work. To study Creative Writing is to be constantly stretched by the possibilities of language . Writers must not shrink from this challenge, and the student writers in this anthology certainly have not.
SHALOM * TYPO