with Ria Cordeiro

4th March 2025

6-9pm (GMT, Zoom, recorded)

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 2025

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 Linh S. Nguyen

18th March-8th April 2025

6-8pm (GMT, Zoom, recorded)

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 2025

6-9pm (GMT, Zoom, recorded)

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. 

with Jessica Wright

7-28th May 2025

6-8pm (GMT, Zoom, recorded)

Hermit crabs are born without their own containers. Famously, they adopt or steal their exoskeletons. In literature, hermit crabs are narratives that inhabit borrowed documentary forms, such as maths tests and rejection letters. Hermit crabs are often autobiographical, the form acting as a protective shell for vulnerable 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. By definition, the hermit crab form is one of mimicry and/or thievery, of incompleteness, of making novel and provisional homes.

Yet hermit crabs themselves sometimes take homes by force, and indeed they appear separately in literary tradition as a figure for white writers using narrative tropes from indigenous traditions in colonised countries. Then there’s the way that their binary of hard shell/soft underbelly replicates cis-heteronormative structures and stories.

In this way, hermit crabs gesture to some of the complexities and contradictions of queerness. They point to the importance of recursive and critical self-reflection on our strategies for connecting and compromising and borrowing and building. They ask us what structures we need or rely on or make do with in our efforts toward freedom.

How do we relate to the containers and structures we live with(in)? How do they change us, and how do we change them? What contradictions come to light when we examine the ways we seek to make home?

This four-week course offers space and provocation to write into these questions through a focus on hermit crab essays and their limits & possibilities as queer forms.

Image by Ahmed Sobah via Upslashon goes here

with Emily Fitzell

31st May 2025

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. 

with Char Heather

3-24th June 2025 (Tuesdays)

5-7pm (GMT, Zoom, recorded)

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 Sam Amsler and Ruth Charnock

5-26th June 2025 (Thursdays)

6-8pm (GMT, Zoom, recorded)

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: 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. 

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.

with Radha Patel

8th June 2025

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 2025

2-6pm (GMT, Zoom, asynchronous recording with resources provided)

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 2025

10.30-4.30 pm (GMT, Zoom)

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. 

with Supriya Rakesh

25th October

11:00am-1:00 pm (GMT, Zoom)

When was the last time you encountered a dragon on your creative journey? Did it block your path or breathe fire onto your motivations? Treading the creative path with its inherent uncertainties, often feels like being the protagonist of your own adventure story. We want to reach the treasure, but the journey is beset with dragons.

In this workshop, I invite you to meet the dragon of creative exhaustion.

It has many names, takes many forms. It shapeshifts into fatigue, sleeplessness, burnout. It blocks your path, as overwhelm or resistance. It distracts you with its magical charms, causing indecision or procrastination. It could wrap itself around your curiosity to explore and scare you from new commitments. Or follow you down every path, chasing your motivation to begin, and capacity to finish your dream projects.

How we meet these dragons matters. Do we fight or flee? Do we seek support from our tribe, our creative communities? Do we find a way to accept and befriend the dragon? 

In this workshop, we use personal storytelling through art, imagination and metaphor to uncover and discover our dragons of creative exhaustion. In a playful and nurturing space, you will draw and colour, reflect and explore, dialogue and share, coming into a deeper understanding of your persistent, significant creative challenges. We will discover how to move from ‘warrior’ mode to gentler ways of encountering our dragons, tapping into self-compassion and our unique sources of resilience.

In this offering, Supriya draws upon creative facilitation approaches, her personal experience with burnout, and her academic background as a PhD in Organisational Behaviour.

with Laura Palau Barreda

15th, 22nd & 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.

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 a post-travel, interpersonal, sci-fi adventure – a speculative exercise exploring the conditions and context that would be appropriate for humans 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 expanding out into knowing what it is to be more than human?

Read more about the story setting here!

In this immersive writing workshop, we will weave ethnographic writing methods, some role play, storytelling, and speculative thinking, to co-create characters living and working at Studio Swan, channeling Karrabing Film Collectives’ methods.

This workshop is for anyone with an active interest in contemporary ecology writing + thinking (including Anna Tsing, Karen Barad, Adrienne Maree Brown, Donna Haraway, Natassja Martin, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), along with experimental world building in the context of the ever pressing question, how to live together?

“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” (Elizabeth Povinelli).

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