NEW: Regolith Lab
a creative writing intensive with a difference - open for bookings now and beginning in November 2024
It’s been a hectic and, at times, distressing fortnight as you’ll understand if you read my last Substack post. Which incidentally, many of you did, thank you! I am always the recipient of such goodwill on Substack/through this newsletter, and I am grateful for your kindness and readership. It means the world.
For the time being I am home, and this (along with not being on my trip…yet!) has afforded me the time to do two things: firstly, I have finished painting my bedroom, including the dreaded skirting boards. Secondly, I have had bonus time to get my next creative writing workshop ready for launch. Having time to do both of these is, ironically, why you are receiving this 12 hours late!
But back to the workshop.
Which isn’t a workshop really. It’s a lab. A month-long intensive. A space to explore and experiment. A nod to the dance-movement world. A completely unique offering that looks sideways and upside down at everything unfinished and unconsolidated that we carry within us. I know I say this about every thing I launch, but I’m really excited. I absolutely love hosting experiences that look at the creative process a little differently, be it through the body, through natural form, through a new metaphorical lens.
I had the idea a good while back now. In fact, the initial idea came to me as I was finishing Weathering. The book ends in praise of regolith - the vast cover of unconsolidated ‘rubble’ that blankets the earth (and the moon, and Mars…); the very top part of which we know - and love - as soil. As a sedimentary geologist and psychotherapist I suppose I would say this, but I really think we don’t give enough time and space to all that is unfinished and even a bit incoherent within us. What is with our cultural story of completion?
When I reflect on my creative process - writing and otherwise - I recognise how much material I recycle. I am, in fact, in the continual long-process of recycling whole careers into new worlds. I routinely go through my own archives for half-finished thoughts and projects that might hold resonance for current thinking (hello zine!) and I am endlessly exploring my longest-standing preoccupations and fantasies. I love to work like this. It’s how I know I am working on what’s really mine and what really matters to me.
We have somehow come to expect creativity to look like the constant generation of new material that creates other new material, but perhaps creativity isn’t meant to be like single use cartons made of virgin plastics? Is that a sustainable way to work in such a demanding age? Can we do better? Can we have a creativity fit for the times - the world - we live in? Less extraction, more exploration. More re-using. More drip-drip-drip of time and imagination feeding the deep well. This is part of what it means to me to live geologic.
These are the sorts of questions and practices I am looking to explore with you in Regolith Lab. What if we spent time revealing our own regolith and then sifting through it curiously for idiosyncratic connections? What if we understood that all of that material is actually the substrate of our creative lives, and that within it lies the material needed to help grow the good stuff? In the material, living world, regolith is vital for the replenishment of aquifers and groundwater that keep our world wet and liveable. Can we translate this into a new metaphor for creativity?
I think so, and I’ve aimed to do so with this new autumn-winter intensive that begins online on November 20th. Running through till 11th December, we will meet together twice a week to get quietly, gentle, generative (one evening teaching session, and one morning ‘aquifer’ session) - not with the aim of making everything coherent and consolidated, but simply to explore all that is fragmentary. I will share some thinking and lots of tools and resources, we will work with our bodies and minds to collide material, and we will embrace the unexpected in the process. We will have a mini reading group and you will get a one-to-one with me to think through anything that emerges for you in the intensive.
Sound good? If your gut says yes, why not have a look at the information on my website about joining. There’s so much I want to say about this intensive, but I also want to save a lot of the thinking for the lab itself.
What I will say is this: along with the already-sold-out Narrative Journey and Natural Form short workshop in October, this is going to be my last group in 2024. I was intending to run the embodied mentoring group again, but eager to begin my next book, I have decided to wait and run the mentoring group in 2025 (dates tbc - if you’re on the waiting list I will be in touch). I still offer one-to-one mentoring though, so please get in touch if you were eagerly awaiting the longer programme.
I am in an exciting place with my writing workshops at the moment - I now have a full complement of short, medium and long offerings that I feel incredibly proud of, and which sing specifically to my interests and expertise. All have embodiment at the core. All have the natural world at their heart. All are themselves creations grown from the thick layer of regolith that makes up my life. It’s a great, easy, feeling to offer things from this place.
Excited for all those going on this new journey with you - it sounds like an amazing way to create and write. x
Sounds wonderful!