with Nicky Torode

7th, 14th, 21st & 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 Emma Gomis

9th, 16th, 23rd & 30th October

7-9pm (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 explores 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. The workshop centres marginalised multilingual voices to bring awareness to language hierarchies as limitations to writing and art. 

Multilingualism is all around us. It shapes the world, it is how we care for each other and, crucially for us as artists, it affects how we create. In this workshop, we will play with what we believe are the limitations of language. If you don’t understand a word, a song, a sound or even a gesture, it might not be a loss but rather an opportunity. If we tune into that which we think we don’t understand, we might push the boundaries of our writing, our work, and indeed our world/s. 

This workshop is perfect for people looking to get experimental with their next writing project, but it’s open to anyone interested in languages more broadly. There will be plenty of prompts that can be used in different forms of creativity and plenty of languages to engage with as well. We will use a variety of media including, images, videos, music and different forms of writing as inspiration. It will be run in English but you are welcome to write/create in any language you want. Feel free to come as you are or bring something you are working on. 

If you are interested in getting a flavour of Mymona’s multilingual workshops, you can read this essay. It was commissioned by the North East Combined Authority and is all about her multilingual, creative work with the community writing group ‘World Writes.’ 

with Aude Konan

New course date coming soon!

Language has been used as a tool for minorities as potential Nation-States, in order to resist and exercise their autonomy. Yet language death is a real threat: 90% of current spoken languages will become extinct 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 has led to many languages slowly disappearing, or using increasing 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 being empowered enough to write in your language and transmit it to the next generation.

This course 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 and Catalonian speakers), and especially people coming from the Global South (such as Twi speakers, Bambara speakers, Hokkien speakers, and more).

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)

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

‘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’ (E. Povinelli).

Step inside the story and meet your character here in STUDIO SWAN!