Tutors 2025

Poetry: ‘Places We Love’ – Poetry and Place – FULLY BOOKED – email for waiting list

‘Places we love exist only through us’ – Ivan V Lalic. Many great poems spring from a sense of place. If you start with place a poem can go anywhere; the subject opens out in all sorts of directions. On this week in Garsdale – one of the most beautiful places of all – there’ll be time to stretch out and explore all the ways places can make poems, just as all those special places make us.
Jonathan Edwards – Tutor
Imtiaz Dharker – Guest Reader
24th – 29th March 2025

Memoir/Life Writing: That Book in You – FULLY BOOKED -email for waiting list

'Everyone has a book in them'. Do we? Perhaps it's true when we write from our own experience. Whether it's a single episode from your life to craft into an essay, or a whole family history that's itching at your writing hand, this course will help you find the extraordinary in the authentic.
Linda Cracknell – Tutor
Alan Johnson – Guest Reader
7th – 12th April 2025

Fiction: Developing Your Writing – FULLY BOOKED – email for waiting list

This fiction writing course is suitable for writers of all levels and will be helpful whether you arrive at Garsdale with a blank page or with a project on which you have already started work.
Hannah Vincent – Tutor
Joanna Quinn – Guest Reader
28th April – 3rd May 2025

Poetry: Writing Poetry – FULLY BOOKED – email for waiting list

Welcoming new and experienced poets, this popular course will appeal to those keen to develop their poetry. We’ll explore the craft and mystery of poetry, its many devices: image, metre, rhyme, lineation … how both traditional forms and free verse can enrichen a poet’s voice. Using a range of poetic voices and themes as stimulus, we’ll write out of memory and from close observation.
Paul Henry – Tutor
Maura Dooley – Guest Reader
2nd – 7th June 2025

Tutored Poetry Retreat: The Next Leap Forward – FULLY BOOKED – email for waiting list

This tutored retreat is designed for writers to work intensively with a focus on individual sessions to help them develop their work. Each participant will have a 30 minute individual tutorial each day, Tuesday - Friday and there will be an introductory 60 minute group workshop on the Monday.
Mimi Khalvati – Tutor
Seni Seneviratne – Guest Reader
30th June – 5th July 2025

Tutored Fiction Retreat: Novel Writing

Novelists, memoirists, short story writers – do you need time, space and encouragement to move your manuscript forward? This retreat is for prose writers who want guidance and motivation to help their work-in-progress achieve its potential.
Zoë Strachan – Tutor
Louise Welsh – Guest Reader
14th – 19th July 2025

Memoir: Write Your Own Story

Memoir writing is the art of writing your own story in your own voice. Everyone’s life experiences are unique and deserve to be told. Join us to write your own story. Suitable for writers of any level of experience, or none.
Catherine Simpson – Tutor
Sam Miller – Guest Reader
1st – 6th September 2025

Tutored Poetry Retreat: Developing Your Poetry

This tutored retreat is designed for writers to work intensively with a focus on individual sessions to help them develop their work. This tutored retreat includes one 90 minute group workshop and one 30 minute individual tutorial each day, Tuesday - Friday with a group introductory workshop on the Monday.
Steve Ely – Tutor
Jane Kite – Guest Reader
15th – 20th September 2025

Poetry: Locating Ourselves in Poetry

Most of us inhabit several places – ones where we presently live, ones we have inside us from earlier times in our lives or from family stories, ones we've only glimpsed but leave a lasting trace, or where we find ourselves in dreams. Balanced by awareness of the immediate setting, Garsdale itself, we'll build a safe but stimulating small group to investigate our different places together, alongside or alone.
Philip Gross – Tutor
Ann Pilling – Guest Reader
13th – 18th October 2025

Poetry: Write What You Don’t Know…

How poems have minds of their own and what we can do to discover their secrets. In this course, we’ll be exploring how we as poets can best serve the poems we write. It’s all-too easy to think we know what we want to say – but what if the poem has other ideas? In writing workshops, we’ll focus on trusting our poems and on learning how to be comfortable with the uncertainty that a new poem brings.
Katharine Towers – Tutor
John Glenday – Guest Reader
10th – 15th November 2025