with Ria Cordeiro

4th March

6-9pm (GMT, Zoom)

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

Step beyond the limits of logical thinking and into a realm where creativity flows from the subconscious and the body. This workshop invites you to explore innovative approaches to creative writing that blend intuitive expression, somatic practices, and artistic exploration.

Through two core exercises, you’ll uncover new layers of self-expression and connection:

Found poetry: Transform language into art by curating words, phrases, or sentences from newspapers and magazines. Assemble them into a poetic collage that reveals surprising juxtapositions and hidden emotions. This process shifts the focus from creating language to discovering meaning in unexpected places.

Embodied writing: Engage in a meditative writing practice that integrates movement, drawing, or stillness. Write one line, pause for a somatic experience, and return to write the next. By breaking linear thought patterns, this technique opens a door to subconscious insights and raw authenticity.

This workshop is perfect for writers, artists, and curious minds eager to explore the intersection of creativity, the subconscious mind, and embodied practices. With a balance of guided proposals and personal exploration, you’ll uncover surprising ways of connecting with yourself and the written word.

Rooted in surrealist traditions, somatic psychology, and meditative practices, this journey offers a unique path to self-discovery. Whether you are a seasoned creator or someone new to the world of writing, this experience will allow you the opportunity to dive deeper into intuitive expression and emerge with new perspectives and inspirations.

with Tom McLaughlin

10th March

6-8pm (GMT, Zoom)

What is the relationship between the form of our writing and the domestic spaces that shelter and enable it? What is particular about queer modes of inhabitation and how might they impact creative work? Through guided writing prompts and discussion of sample poems, you will consider ways of formally and thematically reflecting queer domesticity before crafting poems that explore significant spaces and non-normative modes of living. This session will encourage you to consider and reflect on your own experiences of home, capturing the tensions between concealment and display, between marginalisation and shelter.

with Aude Konan

13th March - 3rd April

6-8pm (GMT, Zoom)

Language death is a real threat: 90% of current spoken languages will become instinct by 2050. Language, like culture, changes and takes different forms as time goes on. However, the unique combination of capitalism, ecocide, colonisation and other forms of oppressions have led to many languages slowly disappearing, or increasingly using borrowed words from western languages that have been used to disempower them. 

Do you speak or understand a minority language? Are you worried about this language being at risk of disappearing? This course will teach you how to fight linguistic genocide and be empowered enough to write in your language and transmit it to the next generation. Language has been used as a tool for minorities as potential Nation-States, in order to resist and exercise their autonomy.

This workshop is for everyone who yearns to reconnect with a language that is at risk of disappearing and about language death. It welcomes people coming from a minority background whose language is not spoken by the majority (like Gaelic speakers, Catalonian speakers, etc), and especially people coming from the Global South (such as, for example, Twi speakers, Bambara speakers, Hokkien speakers, etc).

with Linh S. Nguyen

18th March-8th April

6-8pm (GMT, Zoom)

These sessions will be recorded and made available to all registrants.

In this course, we will reflect and diffract four facets within the experience of loving: sensations of love, queer love, the inner child, and heartbreak. The course will be particularly interesting to those curious about mixed arts practices and who want to sit with emotions, process in community, and create emergent meaning from lived experience.

You will come away with a deeper understanding of fragmentation as a rebellious writing practice in zine-making and learn about how love and lived realities intersect with epistemology and academia. There will be lots of time for (optional) sharing and discussion.

The texts that inform this offering include Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic", adrienne maree brown's "Pleasure Activism", and Megan M. Burke's "Love as a Hollow: Merleau-Ponty’s Promise of Queer Love". and methodology-wise, Lina Fadel's “(Re)writing the Fragmented Self".

with Vida Adamczewski

26th March

6-9pm (GMT, Zoom)

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

A writing workshop with award winning disabled writer Vida Adamczewski, exploring new ways to write about pain. Taking place on Zoom, this is a relaxed, cameras on or off workshop with plenty of breaks and no pressure to share anything.  

Can you rate your pain on a scale of 1-10? If 1 is numb and 3 is how it feels everyday, then 5 might be a childhood memory of being brave. We know 7 open sesames the pharmacy, while 8 is numb in a different way, and 10 remains a vanishing point on the horizon, stretching further and further away. 

In this workshop, we will create a new "Poetic Pain Scale" to challenge the outdated 1-10 scale used in hospitals, which flattens complex and chronic pain. This workshop is inspired by crip phenomenology; the idea that the best knowledge we have about illness and pain comes from our experience of illness and pain. Using a variety of somatic and writing exercises, we will break down, expand and repurpose the language of pain to better fit our messy, badly-behaved, unquantifiable bodies. 

Meet Me in the Estuary: Writing as Ecotone

with Emily Fitzell

12th April

2-6pm (GMT, Zoom)

Conversing with artists whose work moves through open-ended bodies of water, we’ll feel together towards the estuarine as a means of writing into & beyond ourselves. Informed by critical approaches to the land water binary, we’ll experiment with ways to write with / in this ecotone - moving towards a sense of writing as an ecotone itself. If the estuary extends its own queer ecology, which is always something else, in excess of itself, in what ways do its brackish waters speak through & beyond process, dis-position & form? How might we conceive of our mouths as each others, in some way tidal?

The workshop will draw on specific bodies of water that have shaped its development, while extending invitations to engage with the liminal bodies of water that speak most to you.

Our discussion will open out into a reflection on collaborative writing as a process for holding diverse sensory experiences in collective learning environments - playing with voice, tension, edges & mis/communication.