Courses/Retreats

What does the idea of permission mean to us as poets? Looking at using the example of our literary ancestors and living poets to give ourselves permission to write about subjects and experiment with different techniques, we will also use permission as a tool to build confidence in our own work.

In this course we will read and write poems that respond to their times and explore poems written in the light of current world events, developing strategies for paying attention to the moment, from haiku to poetic journals.

Now is the winter of your full content. Indulge yourself with log fires, outstanding food and the space to write.

It is said that March ‘comes in like a lion, out a lamb.’ Whether wintry or vernal, enjoy the space to write, free from domestic distractions and fuelled by outstanding food.

All lives are extraordinary if looked at in close enough detail. Come and join us to learn more about using your lived experience in your writing.

How can you make your poems live and breathe, both on and off the page? During the week we will explore a wide variety of styles, forms, writing processes and techniques, focusing on writing new poems.

Everything You Can Imagine is Real’: Poetry, the Real and the Surreal. Whether you’re keen to unleash the imagination more fully in your poems, or to give your visions a greater grounding in reality, this course will provide a range of strategies to allow your poems to sing with the weirdness of the everyday and the normality of the fantastic.

Come to Garsdale in May, ‘Of spring and summer months the queen.’ (Clare) Leave off gathering nuts and enjoy the space to write, free from domestic distractions and fuelled by outstanding food.

In this course we will read and write poems that make the ordinary extraordinary through the medium of poetry. Open to all, the course will offer both writing activities and feedback on poems-in-development.

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 and write it to read like fiction.