Hello writers,
I’ve been thinking a lot about how important it is to be a part of the world. Like all good therapists going for therapy, I think it’s important for all good writers to be in workshop, or at least to be seeking feedback and advice on their writing as often as they can. Yes, writing is a solitary task, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a lonely one.
I’ve had a busy week here in Cape Town with the Open Book Festival Workshop Week in full swing.
I had a fantastic time on Monday at Kerry Hammerton’s Flash Workshop, writing stories with prompts and listening to the ideas of other writers. Check out Kerry’s Substacks too. You can also purchase her poetry collections, here. In her workshop I started three new flash fictions that I hope to finish over the coming months. If you’d like to go to one of Kerry’s workshops, check out her Substacks for more information.
On Thursday I had hoped to go to illustrator Karen Vermeulen’s course, How to Write a Graphic Memoir, but my tiniest caught the latest of the crèche plagues and had to stay home. Her memoir, Good Luck To Us All is hilarious and as an added bonus features cats. She also runs wonderful illustration courses. Check out her website for more details.
I also highly value the work of the Life Righting Collective who offer incredible writing courses for people wanting to write memoir, non-fiction, and poetry. I attended a memoir course with them in about 2018 and I absolutely loved it - the facilitation was excellent and I wrote reams and reams. Extremely healing and productive too.
The workshops I’ve been too most often over the past few years (which is admittedly fewer than I would have liked to thanks to the realities of raising small children) have been those run by Maire Fisher and Chantal Stewart. These are always warm and wonderful spaces and I leave with pages and pages of writing to type up, and loads of creative writing energy.
I share these because I think that the more we write the better our writing becomes. Writers are not in competition with each other, and I think its important for us to share opportunities for even more writing to get done. Every great piece of writing helps us all get closer to the truth, to the heart of things, to understanding.
Happy writing this week!