All these events are online and accessible to all.
Please read our refund policy.
*New* Neurodivergent Writer’s Toolkit: Avoidance & Procrastination
Facilitator: Amanda Marples
New online!
Session 2: Do you find you just can’t seem to get round to writing that story you’ve been thinking about for weeks (even years)? Do you find yourself pushing that great idea back in favour of organising your sock drawer or binge-watching Mindhunter…until you either completely lose interest, or you feel like such a failure that all you can do is organise your sock drawer or binge-watch Mindhunter? Join Amanda Marples and find out what the hell is going on there, why this stuff is more common amongst neurodivergent writers and pick up some solid strategies to stop procrastinating and get some writing done.
You do not need a diagnosis to attend these sessions.
Herding Cats Poetry Group
Host: Anne Grange
If you are writing poetry but don't know any other poets, or if you just fancy a regular poetry check-in every two weeks, this group is for you! We will read and share work and give each other gentle and constructive feedback. We'll also do a writing exercise together, set ourselves poetry prompt challenges and talk about poetry.
Everyone is welcome, whether you've written volumes of poetry or are just dipping your toe in the poetry waters. It's just an hour - enough to kickstart your passion for poetry!
Monday Motivation
Host: Beverley Ward
Start your week as you mean to go on - as a writer! Set goals, measure progress and get the support of myself and other writers who know the ups and downs of the writing life.
We meet on Zoom at 9am every Monday.
Monday Motivation
Host: Beverley Ward
Start your week as you mean to go on - as a writer! Set goals, measure progress and get the support of myself and other writers who know the ups and downs of the writing life.
We meet on Zoom at 9am every Monday.
*New* Online Group Mentoring for Neurodivergent Writers
Host: Amanda Marples
Hands up who is neurodivergent and really needs some support with their writing? Who longs for a writing coach but is having enough trouble paying the gas bill? Here is a solution: low-cost, high-quality group mentoring.
Here's what to expect:
Monthly meetups
Small groups of no more than 5 writers
Opportunity and dedicated space to bring your writing-related executive function issues (see below)
Space to talk it through with other ND writers
Access to the expertise of ND professional writer and mentor Amanda Marples (facilitating)
Solutions
Gentle accountability and goal-setting
What are writing-related executive function issues? (not an exhaustive list!)
Time management
Focus and concentration
Motivation & procrastination
Rejection sensitivity
Planning and workload management
Maintaining interest
Managing boom-bust cycles of activity
Making sense of feedback & understanding submission requirements
Bring your stuff ... and let's find a way through it together.
*New* Neurodivergent Writer’s Toolkit: Time Management
Facilitator: Amanda Marples
New online!
Session 3: Time flies, and never more so that it seems to around the neurodivergent writer. This workshop with Amanda Marples is all about pesky clock-time: how to use it, how to manage it, how to be its boss (and not the other way around). Learn the truth about productivity, habits and routines, and why time-blindness is such a problem for those of us with brains wired up differently than the average Shakespeare.
You do not need a diagnosis to attend these sessions.
Herding Cats Poetry Group
Host: Anne Grange
If you are writing poetry but don't know any other poets, or if you just fancy a regular poetry check-in every two weeks, this group is for you! We will read and share work and give each other gentle and constructive feedback. We'll also do a writing exercise together, set ourselves poetry prompt challenges and talk about poetry.
Everyone is welcome, whether you've written volumes of poetry or are just dipping your toe in the poetry waters. It's just an hour - enough to kickstart your passion for poetry!
Write from the Art
Facilitator: Rosie Carnall
Write from the Art is a fun and thought-provoking art-inspired ONLINE creative writing session.
We'll start by looking at an artwork together as the starting point for a series prompts and exercises to inspire your thinking and writing.
Whether you can’t remember the last time you picked up a pen or you’re a well-practiced scribbler, you’ll enjoy this friendly, stimulating approach to generating new writing. Join us to try out new ideas and write some sentences that only you can write.
Suitable for anyone who enjoys words in company - talking with them, exploring what they mean and writing them down.
Monday Motivation
Host: Beverley Ward
Start your week as you mean to go on - as a writer! Set goals, measure progress and get the support of myself and other writers who know the ups and downs of the writing life.
We meet on Zoom at 9am every Monday.
Neurodivergent Writer’s Toolkit: Paralysis, Motivation & Focus
Facilitator: Amanda Marples
Sometimes, neurodiversity looks like being glued to a chair with a racing mind and a body that Just. Will. Not. Move, regardless of the million-miles-an-hour commentary your brain is producing. It's not fun for anyone, but a disaster if you’re a writer trying to make a competition deadline, a freelancer with an article to file or a new writer who doesn’t want to watch another free afternoon go down the drain. Join Amanda Marples for the fourth workshop in the series and learn all about paralysis and task initiation and their less cool mates focus and concentration. In this session you will learn how to:
get the best out of your poor old struggling executive function
stop getting distracted by the weird noise outside
Prioritise and stay on task (as opposed to starting five new projects at once and not finishing a single one)
get started in the first place … and keep going.
Monday Motivation
Host: Beverley Ward
Start your week as you mean to go on - as a writer! Set goals, measure progress and get the support of myself and other writers who know the ups and downs of the writing life.
We meet on Zoom at 9am every Monday.
Creative Critique: Interactive Feedback Process
Facilitator: Rosie Carnall
Creative Critique offers a different approach to feedback for writers. Based on philosophical enquiry methods, the process provides the opportunity to explore what meaning a reader finds in your writing. It's an interactive, interesting and affirming experience.
The structured process goes beyond opinions about word choice or sentence structure. It invites reflection on how the work lands with the reader, encouraging their broader responses on what they experience in your writing. This enables you to get a clearer idea about whether your writing intentions are matched by the reader experience.
In this workshop, we’ll warm-up together by listening to a passage of text and practising the method. Then you’ll spend time with other writers listening and responding to each other’s work using a structure that supports you to delve into the underlying themes in your work.
Bring a short prose passage (around 300 words i.e., first page) of your own writing to share. Take away some new insights on your writing and ideas to apply to self-critique in the future.
This kind of philosophising invites use of your creative, critical, collaborative and caring thinking to explore ideas together. Come ready to listen as well as speak.
Monday Motivation
Host: Beverley Ward
Start your week as you mean to go on - as a writer! Set goals, measure progress and get the support of myself and other writers who know the ups and downs of the writing life.
We meet on Zoom at 9am every Monday.
Neurodivergent Writer’s Toolkit: Imagination & Overwhelm
Facilitator: Amanda Marples
Creativity usually demands ideas, and stability.. What if you don’t have either? What if you tip into sadness, fury or anxiety at the drop of a hat? What if your imagination sometimes goes on holiday, or what if you just don’t have pictures AT ALL in your mind (that’s an actual thing, and some of us keep it a secret). What if your emotional state pulls you away from the page on a daily basis, even though you know writing can nurture and soothe. In this session, Amanda Marples will be exposing, exploring and finding solutions to some of the most difficult of areas for neurodivergent writers: rigid ways of thinking, aphantasia and emotional dysregulation.
Monday Motivation
Host: Beverley Ward
Start your week as you mean to go on - as a writer! Set goals, measure progress and get the support of myself and other writers who know the ups and downs of the writing life.
We meet on Zoom at 9am every Monday.
Online Group Mentoring for Neurodivergent Writers
Host: Amanda Marples
Hands up who is neurodivergent and really needs some support with their writing? Who longs for a writing coach but is having enough trouble paying the gas bill? Here is a solution: low-cost, high-quality group mentoring.
Here's what to expect:
Monthly meetups
Small groups of no more than 5 writers
Opportunity and dedicated space to bring your writing-related executive function issues (see below)
Space to talk it through with other ND writers
Access to the expertise of ND professional writer and mentor Amanda Marples (facilitating)
Solutions
Gentle accountability and goal-setting
What are writing-related executive function issues? (not an exhaustive list!)
Time management
Focus and concentration
Motivation & procrastination
Rejection sensitivity
Planning and workload management
Maintaining interest
Managing boom-bust cycles of activity
Making sense of feedback & understanding submission requirements
Bring your stuff ... and let's find a way through it together.
Write from the Art
Facilitator: Rosie Carnall
Write from the Art is a fun and thought-provoking art-inspired ONLINE creative writing session.
We'll start by looking at an artwork together as the starting point for a series prompts and exercises to inspire your thinking and writing.
Whether you can’t remember the last time you picked up a pen or you’re a well-practiced scribbler, you’ll enjoy this friendly, stimulating approach to generating new writing. Join us to try out new ideas and write some sentences that only you can write.
Suitable for anyone who enjoys words in company - talking with them, exploring what they mean and writing them down.
*New* Online Group Mentoring for Neurodivergent Writers
Host: Amanda Marples
Hands up who is neurodivergent and really needs some support with their writing? Who longs for a writing coach but is having enough trouble paying the gas bill? Here is a solution: low-cost, high-quality group mentoring.
Here's what to expect:
Monthly meetups
Small groups of no more than 5 writers
Opportunity and dedicated space to bring your writing-related executive function issues (see below)
Space to talk it through with other ND writers
Access to the expertise of ND professional writer and mentor Amanda Marples (facilitating)
Solutions
Gentle accountability and goal-setting
What are writing-related executive function issues? (not an exhaustive list!)
Time management
Focus and concentration
Motivation & procrastination
Rejection sensitivity
Planning and workload management
Maintaining interest
Managing boom-bust cycles of activity
Making sense of feedback & understanding submission requirements
Bring your stuff ... and let's find a way through it together.
Monday Motivation
Host: Beverley Ward
Start your week as you mean to go on - as a writer! Set goals, measure progress and get the support of myself and other writers who know the ups and downs of the writing life.
We meet on Zoom at 9am every Monday.
Herding Cats Poetry Group
Host: Anne Grange
If you are writing poetry but don't know any other poets, or if you just fancy a regular poetry check-in every two weeks, this group is for you! We will read and share work and give each other gentle and constructive feedback. We'll also do a writing exercise together, set ourselves poetry prompt challenges and talk about poetry.
Everyone is welcome, whether you've written volumes of poetry or are just dipping your toe in the poetry waters. It's just an hour - enough to kickstart your passion for poetry!
*New* Neurodivergent Writer’s Toolkit: Rejection Sensitivity (Online)
Facilitator: Amanda Marples
New online!
The first of a series of 6 online sessions for writers who are neurodivergent, this session is all about ... the science! What’s going on in the brain, and more importantly, what’s going on in the neurodivergent writer’s brain? In this first workshop you will learn how we are battling our own biology and how that shows up as “rejection sensitivity” and a really loud, often deeply unpleasant inner critic. This is your chance to have a good look at how this stuff might be derailing your writing, and find ways to overcome it (or at least turn the volume down a touch).
You do not need a diagnosis to attend these sessions.
Discount available for booking all 6 sessions.
*New* Creative Critique: Interactive Feedback Process
Facilitator: Rosie Carnall
Creative Critique offers a different approach to feedback for writers. Based on philosophical enquiry methods, the process provides the opportunity to explore what meaning a reader finds in your writing. It's an interactive, interesting and affirming experience.
The structured process goes beyond opinions about word choice or sentence structure. It invites reflection on how the work lands with the reader, encouraging their broader responses on what they experience in your writing. This enables you to get a clearer idea about whether your writing intentions are matched by the reader experience.
In this workshop, we’ll warm-up together by listening to a passage of text and practising the method. Then you’ll spend time with other writers listening and responding to each other’s work using a structure that supports you to delve into the underlying themes in your work.
Bring a short prose passage (around 300 words i.e., first page) of your own writing to share. Take away some new insights on your writing and ideas to apply to self-critique in the future.
This kind of philosophising invites use of your creative, critical, collaborative and caring thinking to explore ideas together. Come ready to listen as well as speak.
Monday Motivation
Host: Beverley Ward
Start your week as you mean to go on - as a writer! Set goals, measure progress and get the support of myself and other writers who know the ups and downs of the writing life.
We meet on Zoom at 9am every Monday.
Monday Motivation
Host: Beverley Ward
Start your week as you mean to go on - as a writer! Set goals, measure progress and get the support of myself and other writers who know the ups and downs of the writing life.
We meet on Zoom at 9am every Monday.
Herding Cats Poetry Group
Host: Anne Grange
If you are writing poetry but don't know any other poets, or if you just fancy a regular poetry check-in every two weeks, this group is for you! We will read and share work and give each other gentle and constructive feedback. We'll also do a writing exercise together, set ourselves poetry prompt challenges and talk about poetry.
Everyone is welcome, whether you've written volumes of poetry or are just dipping your toe in the poetry waters. It's just an hour - enough to kickstart your passion for poetry!
*NEW* Write from the Art
Facilitator: Rosie Carnall
Write from the Art is a fun and thought-provoking art-inspired ONLINE creative writing session.
We'll start by looking at an artwork together as the starting point for a series prompts and exercises to inspire your thinking and writing.
Whether you can’t remember the last time you picked up a pen or you’re a well-practiced scribbler, you’ll enjoy this friendly, stimulating approach to generating new writing. Join us to try out new ideas and write some sentences that only you can write.
Suitable for anyone who enjoys words in company - talking with them, exploring what they mean and writing them down.
Herding Cats Poetry Group
Host: Anne Grange
If you are writing poetry but don't know any other poets, or if you just fancy a regular poetry check-in every two weeks, this online group is for you! We will read and share work and give each other gentle and constructive feedback. We'll also do a writing exercise together, set ourselves poetry prompt challenges and talk about poetry.
Everyone is welcome, whether you've written volumes of poetry or are just dipping your toe in the poetry waters. It's just an hour - enough to kickstart your passion for poetry!