Highly Irregular Newsletter #28 April 2025

New workshops - online and in-person - to warm up your writing muscle, and a permission-themed interview with Melissa Harrison

Hello and welcome to Spring, if that’s what’s happening in your neck of the woods! More on woods and spring-like things in Permission Corner below, where I interview the wonderful Melissa Harrison. Because of the interview, I haven’t recorded an audio version of this post - it would feel weird for me to be doing Mel’s voice! But first, a few announcements.

New Workshops - Online and In-Person

Writing Muscle Warm-Ups

I’ve come to the conclusion over the years that there definitely is a “writing muscle” - and the warmer your writing muscle is, the more you can persuade it to go in all sorts of directions, not just about quantity (you know how I feel about “more more more” from last month’s newsletter) but - like with the body’s muscles - new shapes, angles and forms. I’ve been lifting weights for two years and am still amazed that I can bend down and pick something off the floor without my back going! Why not do the equivalent for your writing?

I floated the idea at the end of the Fairy-Tale-Meets-Crime mash-up Zoom workshop a few weeks ago about monthly one-hour Warm Up Your Writing Muscle Zoom workshops where we’d do three writing exercises in 60 minutes. I love writing fast, before any Inner Critics have time to figure out what’s going on! The response was very enthusiastic so I’m giving it a go.

I’m starting with two, one at the beginning of May, and one at the beginning of June, on different days of the week and slightly different times, so hopefully those of you who want to will be able to come. You can sign up for one or the other - or both, we’ll be doing different writing exercises each time! Details and booking here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/taniahershman/ As ever, there are free and pay-what-you-can options available, and if you can’t join live, everyone who signs up will get the link to the recording afterwards. I’ve heard that I’m pretty good recorded too :) Unbox subscribers will receive your discount code in the April 10th Unbox post.

Arvon “Shorts” Residential

I love meeting so many of you on Zoom, it’s such fun - and I would love to meet some of you in person too. How about a 5-Day Residential Arvon course on the theme of “Shorts: short fiction, non-fiction, poetry & hybrids”, Aug 18-23rd, Totleigh Barton, Devon, UK (and it might even be warm enough to wear shorts too)? Teaching Arvon’s residential courses are one of the highlights of my life, spending 5 days with interested, curious writers at all stages of their writing journey in a beautiful and quiet location with amazing food. I’ve been tutoring these courses for 12 years and magic always happens. Always.

I’m so excited about co-tutoring with the amazing Holly Corfield Carr again, we taught a Hybrid Writing course a few years ago. This time, we’re focusing on short things of every shape and form, which is something I’ve always been passionate about. Why use more words if you can say it all in a tiny space? We have a midweek guest tutor who I cannot wait to meet: Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, a “choreopoet and ethnochoreologist”, two terms I look forward to finding out more about, who brings together dance, poetry, social commentary and visual art on the page and stage. I mean, wow.

There are only 15 places, and bursaries are available - details and booking here: https://www.arvon.org/writing-courses/courses-retreats/residential-writing-course-shorts/ It would be delightful to spend the week with you, no previous writing experience necessary!

Arvon “Shorts” Zoom Taster and Fund-raiser

I am doing for this course what I have done for pretty much every Arvon course I’ve taught, raising funds to be able to offer one completely free place for a writer from an underrepresented community who might never have imagined they could come on an Arvon residential course. To this end, I’d love you all to join us for a joint Arvon Zoom “Shorts” Masterclass on Tues May 20th 7-9pm! Not only will you get a taste of what the Shorts course is going to be like, and meet my co-tutor, Holly, you’ll be helping us raise those funds. We’ll announce how to apply for the free place shortly after the masterclass. Details and booking here, concessionary places also available. It might be called a “masterclass” but it’s open to all, no previous writing experience necessary here either: https://www.arvon.org/writing-courses/courses-retreats/masterclass-shorts/ Hope to see you there!

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Permission Corner: An Interview With The Excellent Melissa Harrison

I’ve spent a lot of time here talking about my own ideas of permission - where I get it from, what it does for me - so I thought I’d try something new and find out what it means to another writer. I’m delighted that my first interviewee is Melissa Harrison, whose answers to my questions I found fascinating and moving, and I’ve stolen some images from her Instagram account to illustrate. Her books include Clay; At Hawthorn Time; All Among the Barley; Rain: Four Walks in English Weather; By Ash, Oak and Thorn; The Stubborn Light of Things; and By Rowan and Yew. I won’t say any more about her, I will let her introduce herself… Welcome to Permission Corner, Mel, feel free to decorate it however you’d like!

Tania: How would you describe yourself when it comes to writing/art?

Mel: For ease, I usually say ‘Novelist and nature writer’. If there’s room I might say ‘Novelist, nature writer, children’s author and podcaster’. These days, if I remember (which I often don’t, but really should), I add ‘and app creator’ to the end of the list.

T: What does the word “permission” mean to you, if anything, in terms of what you do, both for yourself alone and what you offer out into the world?

M: Well, there’s what we give (and don’t give) ourselves permission to do, and what we believe the world isn’t granting us permission to do – and very often, we confuse the two. It’s much easier to tell ourselves we’re not allowed to do something than to admit that we’re not permitting ourselves to try – and from there to work out the reason we’re holding ourselves back. Because we are free, often we freely opt to keep our lives small, because somewhere inside we’ve decided that the cost of our choices might prove too high: embarrassment, criticism, failure, shame. I’m not saying those things don’t matter: they do, but everyone has to weigh them up against their own needs, their own ambition, and make a proper, conscious choice. I think it’s important to be honest with ourselves, even if only in the tiny chamber of our own hearts. For a decade after university I did absolutely no writing at all, not even in private. I gave myself (and other people) all sorts of reasons for that period of painful silence, but the truth was that I chose to withhold permission to try, every single day, and with all the agonies that came with it, because I was scared to fail.

T: Have you found ways to give yourself permission to do the things you do as a writer (and as a human)? Can you share some of those with us?

M: I have, but there isn’t much I can share that’ll be of use to anyone else. It was such a difficult and personal process, and one I’m still undergoing: even today there are forms of writing I don’t believe I have permission to undertake, and that may never change. In some ways I think I held books and writers almost in too high regard (doing an English Lit degree may have been partly to blame). Working for a few years in publishing helped: I glimpsed the unpolished early condition of many manuscripts, and learned a bit about writers, too, how insecure they all were, and how ordinary, for the most part. And then I worked in magazines for a long time, largely as a sub-editor, and learned to be absolutely ruthless about cutting and rewriting, skills that still stand me in good stead today. Nobody has time to worship a contributor’s deathless prose when it’s press day, a major advertiser’s pulled out, you’ve had to lose 12 pages from the flatplan and you need to cut a 1,200-word feature down to 800 words. That definitely helped me get over myself.

I also learned how important it is to take yourself seriously – not just to carve out space and time to work, but to refuse to to mock or belittle yourself or your efforts and ideas. To be creative in any field is to live among thousands of daily thoughts, impressions and questions, any of which might lead you towards a new work that might prove truly valuable, not just in terms of your own work but to the world. If you laugh those thoughts and impressions out of the room they won’t stay, and you won’t make work that matters, so you need to make your life somewhere where those sparks can be visible, can kindle and take light.

At the same time (and I know I’m contradicting myself) you need to not take yourself so seriously that you become inflexible. Very often, it seems to me, good things come out of humour, jokes, or when you let yourself just ‘mess around’. I suppose that kind of creative silliness is a different kind of humour, though: welcoming and curious, instead of being the mocking kind that shuts things down.

T: You've had such a fascinating range of books published - books called "novels", books called "non-fiction" and "nature writing", you've made audio podcasts and now an app. What do these genre labels mean to you? Are they helpful for what and how you write and what you create and offer to the world?

I’m probably quite a conventional writer; I don’t chafe at labels too much, and most of what I want to make fits easily within existing genres. I’m not much of a boundary-pusher, although some of the writing I most admire does exactly that: my friend Lucie, an artist, once told me that the best art is about ‘finding the edges and fucking with them’, and I think she’s absolutely right. I get a deep thrill from seeing people create work that makes the room bigger for the rest of us, even if that’s not what I do myself. The reason I’ve created so many different types of things is probably a mixture of a democratising instinct (I want to find ways of connecting with all sorts of people, not just book-buyers) and over-confidence (‘How hard can it be?’ I tell myself, before firmly biting off more than I can chew).

From Homecoming’s April section - it’s a gorgeous book, I keep on my bedside table for inspiration and information:

“Wherever you are in April, whether town or countryside, look up and out: one by one you’ll see the bigger trees edging into leaf, ‘like something almost being said’, as the poet Philip Larkin wrote...

…At this time of year, as their food sources increase, more and more insects are either waking from hibernation, emerging from cocoons as new adults, or hatching out from eggs.”

T: We first met when we were both writers-in-residence at the glorious Gladstone's Library eleven years ago! After we met, I came to hear you give a talk about nature at Bristol's Festival of Ideas, I think it was, that changed forever how I looked at the trees on my street. You inspired me to notice, to pay attention in a new way. Your latest book is called "Homecoming: A Guided Journal to Lead You Back to Nature" and you've just launched an app called "Encounter" - "a free, guided nature journal from that will open your eyes to your nearby wild" (I love that phrase, 'nearby wild'!) What is it you'd like to pass on permission for people to do through the book and the app, as well as your wonderful Witness Marks Substack and so much more that you do and that you are?

M: Oh, well – just, to live in the world. To live in community and communion with the living world which we have had the astonishing good fortune to inherit and bear witness to and which continues to sustain us, far beyond what we deserve. To take part in the world, not as backdrop or scenery, but as a full member, as do all other living things: to be a participant in mud, trees, shadows, water, light, stones, wind and good green growth.

And with that, to live fully and knowingly within the world’s time: its vast history and unguessable future, and the smaller, gimcrack, chequered history our kind has created within that great story, and which we have yet to take responsibility for. To choose, daily, not to revoke or let lapse our membership, despite the terrible ease of doing so, despite virtual reality, techno-futurism, swiping left, AI, the metaverse, cryogenics and SpaceX. To stay in and of the world and bear it witness even as it sickens, and to find joy and meaning in its company beyond anything else.

T: Is there a question no-one has ever asked you in interviews or at events that you'd love to be asked?

M: I’d settle for not being asked where I get my ideas!

Thank you so much, Mel! If there’s anything you’d like to ask or say in the comments, about Mel’s thoughts on permission or anything else we’ve talked about, we’d love to hear from you…! Find out more about Mel over at her website, Instagram account and Witness Marks Substack, and grab the Encounter nature app wherever you get your apps.

See you next month,

Tania xxx

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