Courses/Retreats

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.

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.

‘Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu…..’ Let your writing blossom as summer arrives with its seasonal influx of house martins, curlews, lapwings and oyster catchers. Enjoy the space to write, free from domestic distractions and fuelled by outstanding food.

We’ll consider the craft and mystery of poetry, along with the creative choices we make. This course welcomes both new and experienced poets who are keen to develop their work within a friendly, supportive environment.

For writers with ideas and some experience, looking for some dedicated time to progress a longer prose project in a supportive and friendly environment. Workshops and daily one-to-one tutorials as well as clear writing time will help you move your novel forward.

Leave those domestic chores behind and escape to the peace and tranquillity of a Garsdale summer.  Indulge yourself with space and time to write in idyllic surroundings. Meet up with your muse…