Highly Irregular Newsletter #21 Sept 2024
Introducing Unbox Your Words - Give Yourself Permission to Play! & my final workshops of the year...
Hello dear writers,
Welcome to all the new subscribers, I hope everyone’s doing well. Doesn’t September still feel - no matter how old we are - like a kind of beginning, if not of the school year for most of us any more, but a chance to restart, refresh, break some habits? In that spirit, I am delighted to be launching Unbox Your Words - Give Yourself Permission to Play! here on Substack next week, Tues 10 Sep. I thought I’d take a little time to share some of my thoughts behind what I’m going to be offering.
Writing, for me, isn’t “just” a job or a career. Writing is how I make sense of the complicated, beautiful and difficult world I find myself living in. Writing helps me be the person I want to be in that world. And I’ve found over 25 years of writing – first short fiction, now also poetry, novels and all sorts of uncategorizable hybrids - that it works best for me if I write what I want in the way I want to write it; this has become something of a mantra for me.
I know so very very well after 25 years how we can often get in our own way and listen to those voices telling us we “shouldn’t” be writing that, or “shouldn’t” be writing it like that. I’ve had to find all sorts of methods to keep those voices quiet in order to give myself permission to write what I want to write in the way I want to write it. Every time I think I’ve quieted one voice - the Short Story Voice, for example - when I’ve moved into a new form, I’ve found a brand new voice (oh so many Poetry Shoulds and Shouldn’ts in my head)!
What I’ve been trying to do for the past eleven years or so is pass along that permission in every writing workshop I teach. I’ve seen the joy that can come when a writer realises that the genre or shape they thought they “had” to work in isn’t set in stone, that we make up our own “rules” so we can break them – and how to play until you find just the write form, shape, rhythm of words to tell the stories you want to tell in the way only you can tell them, whether they be poems, fictions, non-fictions or other forms. When I say “play”, this is no indication that the content of the writing is trivial or doesn’t deal with dark topics: play is a serious endeavour for me, it’s what I am doing with every sentence, it’s what I love about writing.
This is where Unbox Your Words – Give Yourself Permission to Play! – comes in. What I’m offering is not a writing course designed to be followed in any linear way. It’s a monthly shot of permission by way of writing provocation, inspiration & stimulation, designed both to encourage you to write new pieces and to help you find different & exciting ways to approach your works-in-progress - whether they are shaped like flash fiction, poetry, short stories, novels, non-fiction or hybrids, or which dance between and around all of these.
Every month, you’ll get two emails either in your Inbox or the Substack app: on the 10th of each month, I’ll send you a short writing provocation/prompt/exercise to tempt you to break writing habits and dance in new ways with your words. Then later in the month I’ll slip you another email with something to read that I think you might like, something you might never have come across yourself. You can come to the emails/posts in any order, whatever is helpful for you, dipping in and out in your own time – and you’ll have the opportunity, if you like, to share and discuss in the comments on Substack what’s working for you, how you’ve taken and run with the provocations & prompts, how you’re giving yourself permission to play!
There will also be occasional exclusive Zoom workshops for Unbox Your Words subscribers and discounts on other events I am involved in and any new books I have published (more on that soon). To join the adventure for the special monthly price of £3.50 for the first 200 subscribers, all you need to do is upgrade here to a paid subscription. As I’ve mentioned before, if that is not feasible for you, please do message me, I have a few gift subscriptions, no questions asked.
On that financial note, I wanted to say, too, that this new venture is also me giving myself permission to not only approach what I love to do (passing on permission to other writers) but my main method of making a living in a different way. Like almost every writer I know, I am very far from being able to live off what I earn from my writing itself, whether that be individually published pieces, or the books I’ve been fortunate enough to have out there in the world. I have received several arts grants over the years, for which I am incredibly grateful, but the main income comes from teaching. Through Unbox Your Words I’m hoping that I can still do this but at the same time free up more energy and more time and headspace to actually do what most writers want to do: write. Because, to tie that in to what I mentioned in the beginning, when I don’t have the time and energy and headspace to write, it affects every aspect of my life and makes it harder to be the person I want to be. So I want to thank all of you who have already signed up for Unbox Your Words, and those of you who are considering it, for taking that financial leap, too, and I really hope it will be something that you feel is worth it - and something that we co-create. We are on this adventure together!
Final Workshops of 2024
I do have a few more workshops scheduled this year, on Zoom and in person, and I would love to see you there:
ONLINE WRITING WORKSHOP Mon Sep 16th 7-8.30pm UK Time, The Art of the Swerve In this brand new one-off Zoom workshop for the London Lit Lab, we’ll be doing all kinds of swerving to spice up your writing! Tickets £10, if you can’t attend live, you can watch the recording afterwards: https://www.londonlitlab.co.uk/course/art-of-the-swerve-writing-workshop-online/
IN PERSON Poetry Spa for Nine Arches – workshop + reading, Nuneaton, Sat 21st Sept: Join me and Roz Goddard for a wonderful day of reading and writing in Nuneaton Art Gallery, 10am-4pm, during which I will be running a writing workshop on Mashups and Collisions, and then chatting to Roz about my second poetry collection, Still Life With Octopus! Booking here, tickets include a copy of Still Life With Octopus: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/poetry-spa-an-immersive-day-of-reading-writing-saturday-21-sept-2024-tickets-940819896637?aff=oddtdtcreator
LAST TWO PLACES LEFT - IN PERSON Monday Oct 7th – Sat Oct 12th, Totleigh Barton, Devon, Arvon 5 Day Residential Fiction & Hybrid Writing Week: Magic, Reality and All That Lies Between
Join me and Sean Lusk and our special midweek guest, Alinah Azadeh, for a weeklong fiction & hybrid writing residential course inspired by magical realism! Details and booking here: https://www.arvon.org/writing-courses/courses-retreats/residential-writing-week-fiction-25/
Happy September to you all!
Tania x