with Jessica Wright

7-28th May

6-8pm (GMT, Zoom)

Hermit crabs are born without their own container. Famously, they steal exoskeletons from others. In literature, hermit crabs are narratives that inhabit borrowed documentary forms, such as maths tests, rejection letters, and course descriptions. Hermit crabs are often autobiographical, the borrowed form acting as a protective shell in which the writer might explore difficult material. They are considered a kind of essay.

Hermit crab essays challenge expectations about what a narrative is and what it ought to look like, what a document should communicate, and how to interpret a text’s signals and frame. By definition, the hermit crab form is one of mimicry and/or thievery, of incompleteness, of searching for a home. Yet, hermit crabs themselves sometimes take new homes by force, and indeed appear separately in literary tradition as a figure for white writers using narrative tropes from indigenous traditions in colonised countries.

A premise of this course is that these tensions are fruitful. Through readings, discussion, and writing, we will explore the possibilities and tensions of hermit crabs as queer forms. Fundamental to the hermit crab is a contingent relationship to place, home, and body. In this way, it offers a scaffold and a provocation to examine writing and queerness also as modes of relating—to others and to ourselves, to our communities and kin, our traditions, and our futures.

The aims of the course are for participants to leave with 3-4 new pieces of work, and for us all, collectively, to deepen our understanding of hermit crabs and the questions they raise about narrative form, borrowing, at-homeness, and relationality in writing.

Session 1 – hermit crabs as containers for scaffolding and protection

Session 2 – hermit crabs essays as drag

Session 3 – hermit crabs, settler colonialism, and settler sexuality

Session 4 – revising hermit crabs: weaving between story and form

with Char Heather

3-24th June

5-7pm (GMT, Zoom)

This session will be recorded and made available to all registrants.

What does it mean to write in circles? To compose a story of fractals or roots? To spin a yarn that truly spirals? In this course you will be asked to stray from one of the most well-trodden paths through narrative, the arc, and instead, be invited to think about how you can incorporate other shapes into your narratives, informed by your individual embodied experience.

Each week we will discuss the potential of various shapes, how they might reflect or compliment your embodied experience and writing process, and how we might tangibly write using these forms.

We will look to queer and crip theory alongside contemporary writers who are experimenting with narrative forms, such as Renee Gladman, Zoe Wicomb and Jen Calleja, to inform our discussions and the writing we do both in and out of class.

Sessions will be made up of discussion, short readings and writing exercises, with optional reading and writing for you to do outside of class if and when you would like to. Together, we'll think through waves and spirals, knots and networks. You'll be asked to bring shapes that you are interested in to the first session to inform the rest of the course, with the aim that you will leave with a variety of approaches you can take forward into your writing projects. 

with JP Seabright

4th June

7-9pm (GMT, Zoom)

This session will be recorded and made available to all registrants.

DISRUPTION! This workshop will explore disruptive and experimental texts that queer poetic form, and which protest, subvert or reject societal norms.

Reflecting on the work of writers such as Harry Josephine Giles, CA Conrad, and Cleo Henry, participants will explore different techniques and experiment with creating their own queer disruptive texts.

with Sam Amsler and Ruth Charnock

5-26th June

6-8pm

How can writing undo monogamous ways of thinking, being, doing and relating? How is our writing constrained by calcified and normative forms, fears and fantasies about what writing should be and where it should go? Who and what are tied down and twisted by human-only imaginaries, the ‘marriage plot,’ the imperative of prescribed genres, normative happy endings, boring kinds of climax, delusions of linear time, single stories, coherent characters, and the terror of loose ends? How can we write in ways that are more faithful to our already abundant, complex but often invisible and excluded relational ecologies? 

In ‘Writing with Non-monogamy,’ we’ll write through more capacious forms of relationality than are afforded to us by grammars of compulsory monogamy. We’re interested in queer kinds of commitment and the affordances of different forms and practices for non-monogamous writing: graphomania’s passion for proliferation; queer etymology’s intimacy with plurality, subversive/subsumed/lost/forgotten/denied/minor meanings, animism’s more-than-human, earth-and-cosmos-based, nonbinary, relational grammar and participants, and the disruptive connections of erotic forces and flows. 

Who is this for?

This workshop is for writers and creatives of all persuasions at all levels of experience. You don’t need to know anything about non/monogamy to participate and this is not a how-to course. All welcome!

Session 1, – 5th June: intro to writing with non-monogamy: This week, we’ll explore how compulsory monogamy sneaks into our writing, and write through more capacious forms of relationality and queerer kinds of commitment than are afforded to us by its grammars.

Session 2, – 13th June: writing with more-than-human relations: This week we turn to writing with animism’s more-than-human, earth-and-cosmos-based, nonbinary, relational characters and grammar, and to the ecological response-abilities of non-monogamous writers.

Session 3,  – 20th June: writing with queer etymologies: This week, we will play with queer etymology; expanding imagination through linguistic plurality and the portals of subversive, subsumed, lost, forgotten, denied and minor meanings. 

Session 4, – 27th June:  writing with erotic forces and flows: This week, we’ll deepen our practices of writing with non-monogamy by tuning in with the disrupting-connecting forces and flows of the erotic in its manifold forms.

with Radha Patel

8th June

12-3pm (GMT, Zoom)

The Bird That Brings Hope is a creative writing workshop following the story of the ‘Chitibuck’ - a blue feathered bird that lives on the Planet Luz. In the lore of our galaxy, its duty is to travel to other planets and collect the hopes of different species, and keep them in its stomach. When it dies, these hopes nourish the sacred ground beneath our feet. In 2025, the Chitibuck arrives in the UK.

Different folklore from around the world sees birds as guides, mentors and carriers of messages between the human realm and the underworld. So much of this has been lost to colonisation which only sees birds as commodities – to eat, to wear and so on. The purpose of this workshop is to unravel human supremacy and to think about our connections with other species and our duty to each other.

Through a series of conversations, storytelling and creative writing exercises we'll welcome the bird and explore the question 'what is our duty to each other?'

with K. Angel, Lloyd Meadhbh and Erica Rivera

14th June

2-6pm (GMT, Zoom)

In this workshop we will creatively explore concealed queer histories in families of origin, broadly defined. For some of us, this might involve seeking some imaginative or restorative relationship with those figures we were actively or passively encouraged not to know, or not to know fully, whom we now recognize as queer kin. For others, it might mean something different.

Together we will engage ethically and imaginatively with the things that often go undocumented, or are deliberately rendered irrecoverable, in a given family history, and take these absences as provocations to generate our own reparative and incantatory archives.

Structured around acts of (re)situating, archiving, and imagining, this workshop will share tools, techniques, and prompts drawn from:

● Reparative and speculative archiving

● Documentary poetics and autofabulation

● Queer and trans hi(r)storiography

● Trauma-informed self- and community-care practices

to help you create work that nourishes your connection to a queer past and queer possibility. We will develop this work in conversation with writers including Saidiya Hartman, E. Patrick Johnson, T. Fleischmann, Patrisse Cullors, Eve Sedgwick, Ann Cvetkovich, Elizabeth Freeman, Hil Malatino, C. Riley Snorton, and Jules Gill-Peterson.

This workshop is particularly designed for queer and trans creatives across disciplines who are keen to explore their queer heritage in a way that is safe, supportive, and authentic and who want to think, feel, and write beyond the structuring confines of the family of origin and its often violent norms. It also a workshop for those who are eager to expand their writing practice beyond formal, generic, or disciplinary constraints.

As a trio of neurodivergent trans people who operate on queer and crip time, our approach to facilitation assumes disability and non-chrononormative working styles. If you have specific access needs, please get in touch.

with Valeria Levi

21st June

10.30-4.30 pm (GMT, Zoom)

This session will be recorded and made available to all registrants.

The full-day workshop Not Far from the Forest is a space to voice these questions and listen to the voice of the forest within us through movement improvisation and creative writing exercises. Our breathing will play a crucial role in our exploration because, through our breath, we will discover how the forest is always with us, through us. 

Not Far from the Forest is inspired by the dance-theatre performance Listen to the Forest, created by Glasgow-based dancer and writer Valeria Levi. During the workshop Valeria will make the most of her practice which combines movement and writing, using movement and body where words cannot reach and playing with words to cast light upon moments when movement gets too abstract.

The starting point of this workshop is that plants and trees can communicate with us, if we allow ourselves to listen to them. Through creative writing exercises and movement scores, participants will explore two different spaces: 1) the space to breathe, where we can live in harmony with plants and trees, and 2) the anthropocentric bubble, where we live in a hurry and have forgot about our ancestral relationship with plants and trees.

Participants will have the chance to explore both spaces through hands-on-activities and music tracks composed ad hoc for these exercises. After the experiential component of the workshops, participants will take part in some reflective exercises and use writing as a way to cast light upon emotions and sensations felt during the movement explorations. 

For any questions on the workshop, please email Valeria at listentotheforest23@gmail.com

with Nicky Torode

7-28th October

6-8pm (GMT, Zoom)

Fed up of the chronological?

Tired of the hero’s journey?

Then this is the course for you.

Tell it slant, Emily Dickinson cried. So we shall! experiment with fresh and enticing ways to enhance your story: from hermit crabs to braided stories; from epistolary forms to lists. Try on new forms for a great fit!

with Gayathiri Kamalakanthan

8th October

6.30-8pm (GMT, Zoom)

A recording of this event will be available for two weeks following the session.

In this workshop we’ll explore the ways in which we can create texts without the use of a pen or physically typing. The ‘writing’ methods we’ll look at include photography and annotations, voice-to-text, screenshots and collage. This need for hybrid writing stems from my experience of trying to write whilst coming to terms with a pain condition, which meant that sitting and using my laptop to write was painful. We’ll practice creating our own methods of creation that centre the person and what feels mentally, physically and emotionally possible in that moment.

Questions we’ll ask: How does writing accessibly feel? What would the work look like? Would it be shorter? Would it ramble more? Can we see this as a strength? Would it include spelling/grammatical ‘errors’? What if we did not ‘correct’ them away? What if we laid out our thought processes, our streams of creative thinking? 

We’ll look at works including: 

1. 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE and their 4 pamphlets which were published as a single, hybrid offering that resists the publishing industry’s attempt to force a scarcity, competition model on minority writers .

2. adrienne maree brown’s hybrid text ‘Pleasure Activism’ which contains short essays, interviews, drawings, poems and reflective questions on how we make social justice irresistible. 

3. Tina Chang’s ‘Hybrida’, a poetry collection made up of written fragments, photos, screenshots, and lists on the endless power and terror of motherhood. 

This workshop is open to all. You might find it particularly useful if you’re not able to sit and write by hand for too long, if you find being stationary for too long difficult, and if you are curious about expanding your writing practice, into a creative observing/voicing and or walking practice. The workshop will be 90 mins including comfort breaks.

with Emma Gomis

9-30 October (GMT, Zoom)

5-7pm (GMT, Zoom)

Eco means house (from the Greek oikos) and poetics means to make (from the Greek poiesis). Ecopoetics encourages us to consider how we impact our home planet, Earth. Through luminous details and vivid imagery, ecopoetry can oscillate between micro and macro rhetorical registers and encourage us to think critically about how we affect the environment. This course lays out some of the tools and techniques that can be employed in composing ecopoetry. We will write poems that engage with, reflect upon, or consider the environmental crisis we are living.

The course is divided into four sections corresponding to four elements of nature (earth, air, water, and fire). In order to strengthen our environmental literacy, we will look at passages from scientific articles and critical texts alongside a selection of poems by Juliana Spahr, CA Conrad, Lisa Robertson, Bernadette Mayer, Gary Snyder, Fred Moten, Natalie Diaz, and Anne Carson among others.

with Madeleine Kaye

18th October

2-5.30pm (GMT, Zoom)

Smell can be a confronting sense to write with, its place in language often forgotten or ignored. Embodied Scents is a workshop that will explore smell and the olfactory, reigniting our sensory experience through writing. Whether it’s a partner’s cooking permeating the kitchen, the sweet perfume an older sister used to wear, or the dirty exhaust of cars clouding the city, olfactory memories are a constant and generous source of inspiration.

The olfactory can be playful, luxurious, and joyful, but it can also be used as a tool of aggression, unearthing painful memories, or an act of dehumanisation, where we deodorise ourselves and others. When we ignore these aspects of our lived experiences, we deny the influence of scent in our daily lives, and deny our bodies as a powerful place of creative inquiry.

In this session, we will write a short series of creative pieces with scent present throughout. With scented memory and mindfulness as our starting point, we will discuss our shared and sometimes contentious experiences of olfactory language, and continue with other somatic and embodied writing exercises. For perfume lovers and haters alike, this workshop will seek out and challenge the olfactory in your writing.

with Mymona Bibi

3rd November,

6-9pm (GMT, Zoom)

Multilingual Imaginations is a workshop that helps you explore cross-lingual connections and how various linguistic backgrounds can shape and reshape our imaginative landscapes. This includes how language affects our philosophies and ways of being and knowing with a focus on centering marginalised multilingual voices.

The workshop is open to anyone interested in languages and experimental ways of writing.

with Sonika Jaiganesh

8th November

6-8pm (GMT, Zoom)

Kigo, kireji, karumi…  the haiku moment.

Through a blend of teaching, discussion and hands-on exercises, we will cover the fundamentals of haiku, senryu, and haibun. We will then analyse and deconstruct conventions and philosophies, before experimenting with form. 

This workshop welcomes all levels of experience, and creatives of all disciplines (not just poetry!)— you will have the opportunity to apply them during this event, which explores translation: between language, form, and discipline— between experience and account.

with Laura Palau Barreda

15th-29th November (GMT, Zoom)

7-9pm (GMT, Zoom)

In this workshop, we’ll explore grafting and pruning as metaphors and tools for practising experiential learning, treating the trees as living archives that bridge generations of ecological knowledge.

But what does it mean to graft ideas, knowledge, and practices into new forms?

Through hands-on exercises, expanded writing, and collective inquiry, we'll think about our connection to the more-than-human world: seeking for learning with rather than about nature. Rooted in feminist and rural perspectives, we’ll unlearn rational frameworks and embrace intuitive, embodied knowledge, and create new ways of knowing, thinking and inspiring to transform our structures, institutions and organisations.

It is said that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, a reminder that established spaces, often quick to critique, should instead embrace self-awareness and transformation. As Donna Haraway reminds us, “It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with).” This is an invitation to think with nature rather than about it; to learn from the more-than-human world rather than imposing logic onto it.

🌱 For artists, writers, filmmakers, and all those in the process of learning.

📽️ Storytelling | Writing | Ecology | Art

Will you join us?

with Lily M. Frenette

19th November

6-8pm (GMT, Zoom)

In the essay “Beyond the Human,” So & Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd write that “[r]elationships between entities inform and create who we are, and we orient ourselves in the cosmos and in our local places by relating to others.”

Fantasy worlds are filled with wonders of nature beyond anything in our reality: sentient rivers, animals who grant magical favors, trees that can travel. It can be a struggle to write characters who feel truly connected and who we can connect with in these alien settings.

Using theories on queer and ecological identities, in this workshop, we will craft characters whose connection to the natural world helps ground them in fantastical places.

with j. yuru Zhou

25th November

6-8pm (GMT, Zoom)

Following Ester Freider's girlblogging as curatorial piracy, Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulation, and Caroline Busta's writing on divesting from an online self as a part of countercultural practice, in this workshop we will consider the poetics of salvaging and holding seemingly disparate fragments together, emergent relations crystalized by the assemblage of the girlblogger, and emergent acts afforded by our new poetic devices.

Through this process, we'll fashion ourselves as "girlbloggers of history," operating in pedagogical modes of flitting around and scavenging, assembling poetic structures, forms, sculptures we've yet to encounter in the world.

Some further frames of reference for this workshop include Audre Lorde's poetry as "skeleton architecture"; Douglas Kearney in conversation with Cindy Juyoung Ok, reminding us how we can be alive, not as catharsis, but as atmospheric in producing the weather; how Carl Phillips has named poetry as "the tools with which I made a small opening, and the means by which I moved forward," how James Baldwin said "hope is invented every day," and how Audre Lorde has articulated poetry as "vital necessity of our existence...the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change...then into idea, then into more tangible action."

with Khushi Bajaj

6th December

2-5pm (GMT, Zoom)

This session will be recorded and the recording made available to all registrants.

A collage-poetry workshop focused on decolonising the narratives around menstruation. Through artistic activities and discussions centered on South Asian mythologies, menstrual disorders, and bleeding as marginalised people, the workshop will leave you feeling more deeply connected to yourself and the world around you (or maybe just give you a place to rant through art!)

Bloody Bodies is for everyone who menstruates and no previous poetry or collaging experience is necessary.

with Alice Eaves

9th December

6-9pm (GMT, Zoom)

This session will be recorded and the recording made available to all registrants.

Humans have complex, deep connections with spaces they call home, yet we rarely take the time to think about home on a cultural and ecological level. ‘Writing Our Roots’ invites novice and experienced writers alike to contemplate the meaning of home and place-making with the focus on, but not limited to, linguistic histories, heritage, ecology and topography.

Through a series of individual exercises and group discussions, this workshop encourages participants to use the written word as a tool for connectivity, protest, and exploration, hopefully delivering new perspectives on how to interact with the spaces we call home.

with Natascha Nanji

11th December

6-9pm (GMT, Zoom)

‘Welcome to Studio Swan’ is an interpersonal, sci-fi adventure - a speculative proposition exploring the conditions and context that would be appropriate for us to temporarily become (with) plant or animal. And why would this be a desirable or necessary undertaking? A form of meditation? An alternative to travel? Or to expand our horizons of comprehension of knowing– what could feel like to be more than human?

This immersive writing workshop is for anyone with an active interest in contemporary ecology writing + thinking (such as: Anna Tsing, Karan Barad, Donna Harraway, Natassja Martin, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro) along with experimental world building. 

Weaving ethnographic writing methods, some role play, storytelling, and speculative thinking, we will co-create characters living and working at Studio Swan, channeling something of Karrabing Film Collective’s methods,: “Perhaps the central purpose is to discover what we never knew we knew by hearing what we say in moments of improvisation. We suddenly see what we have been saying—what we have been sensing”.