How can writing undo monogamous ways of thinking, being, doing and relating? How is our writing constrained by calcified and normative forms, fears and fantasies about what writing should be and where it should go?

How can we write in ways that are more faithful to our already abundant, complex but often invisible and excluded relational ecologies?

To find out more about this series which we ran with the brilliant Beyond Form, click here.

A space to gather as a group online, touching in to a different chapter from ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, working too with pop culture, psychology, our felt senses and ritual.

These sessions are for you if:

• you are interested in myth and story

• you identity with or are interested in feminist modalities

• you are looking for a community that is predicated on feminist, queer, anti-racist principles

A day of wandering & wondering through the magical spaces of Doddington Hall Gardens, foraging & gleaning with words & the land as we go. Co-hosted with Rachel Petheram of Catkin Flowers.

We will be finding new ways into writing, into embodiment & into your relationship with the land & your own creativity.

What is it that we want from writing? What is it that we want to have with writing? And how can writing help us to feel, resource and move with our desire? In this two hour writing and somatic workshop, we will look to the horizons of our own desire and to the ways in which these desires might want to take and make shape in our writing.

This workshop is suitable for anyone who writes, who wants to write, who wants, who wants to want their writing, and who wants to write with their wanting. It is for the dreamers, the activists, the hopeful, those who are yearning, burning up, stretching towards, swooning, in shame, feeling numb, in lust and in love.

Written collaboratively, this piece, performed at York St John’s takes the form of a series of spells and rituals to counteract the knowledge industrial complex and how it has positioned the witch. Part of this work will be to reclaim academic witches who have been excluded from the academy’s account of itself and, sometimes, excluded in subtle ways from the academy itself. We are also interested in our own makings and unmakings as academic witches, in a longer genealogy.

Read more about this work here.

This lecture with London Drawing Group thinks about what the diarist, author of erotica and all-round provocateuse Anaïs Nin has to teach us about sex in books: what we want from erotic writing, what we definitely don’t want, how women learn about sex from books and what these books might still have to teach us.

The lecture will start with a broad introduction to Nin, for the uninitiated. We’ll think about how Nin’s erotica – much of which feels decidedly unerotic, preoccupied as it is with impotency, paedophilia, and disappointed women – can give us new frames for thinking about our own experiences of bad sex and shame, as well as what we might want sex to do and be for us, both on and off the page.

A series of FREE in-person creative writing and embodiment workshops taking place in Lincoln. Over a series of sessions, you will sense into how nature might inspire and support your creativity, self-discovery, and, specifically, your writing.

These workshops are suitable for anyone who wishes to deepen their connection with nature, whether or not you've ever written creatively before. Experienced writers are also welcome.

What can winter teach us about the possibilities for intimacy, care and collective survival in a time of deep societal, climate and nature emergency? What are the erotics of winter? When the days are short and the air is cold, plants, other animals and unseen relations all around us are resting, replenishing, rebirthing and surviving.

In this workshop – involving writing, making and embodied practice – we will explore our relationship with winter in the Northern Hemisphere, its medicines, and its place in our lives and wider queer ecologies.

A commissioned workshop with artists at Bloc Projects, Sheffield talking about writing, embodiment, and art-making.

As a child, I watched my mum from the stairs as she read tarot cards. She would unfurl the silken black cloth, smooth it down on the carpet then, with a swift flick of her hand, arc the cards out, face-down, for the querent to pick from. This action, the ceremony of it - the glamour! - became my ur-image for female sovereignty. Here, my mum was fully in her power. And it was glorious to bask in that glow.

I pay homage to these scenes, my own coming to tarot & the brilliant Pamela Colman Smith, much-occluded artist of the original Rider-Waite deck (now correctly referred to as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck) in my lecture, ‘Tarot for Feminists’ for the London Drawing Group.

This is a six-week space for women academics who feel uncomfortably placed within academia and want to think about ways of navigating it differently, or navigating out of it.

Our focus will be on our somatic experiences of academia and our feelings within it and about it. We'll be working with story, breath, making practices & community.

Find out more about my deinstitutionalising work here.

A conversation about Anaïs Nin and life writing with artist Martha Orbach as part of the Dust Architects series. Watch here.