Writing about our health – and ill health in particular – can be emotionally gruelling, but it also has the potential to feel therapeutic if we approach writing within safe boundaries. Whether you write poetry, short stories, flash fiction, or creative nonfiction and memoir, by the end of this series of workshops you will discover what you want to say about illness, being disabled, or being a carer, and how to put your experience into words. Covid has so interrupted our lives, but the reality is that prior to the pandemic almost half of the UK population already reported having a long-standing health problem. How we experience life is bound up with how well we feel.
What does it mean to live in good or bad health? If we write about illness or a care experience, what choices confront us as we reflect on our experience? We will explore embodied writing and consider what our bodies are telling us, trusting in our felt senses and symptoms to find new words to fill the page.
A space to explore your health and care experience, on your terms, write freely in a way that feels authentic and individual to you. In these three workshops, there is no right or wrong approach.
Course outline
- Three two-hour live zoom workshops with writer and coach, Andrew Kaye Kauffmann, including a combination of reading, discussion and writing exercises
- Reading material provided outside of the Zoom sessions
- Resources on telling your story within safe boundaries
- Content rooted in the social model of disability, open to people with health and care needs, and those who provide care
Each Live Online workshop will be designed so it is paced to be a comfortable writing experience, suited to writers of all levels. There will be a short comfort break. There is no expectation to be on camera, if you don’t feel comfortable appearing on camera.
Course timetable and content
Across the three zoom workshops, we will read (and begin writing about) the hardships and volatility of illness, the breakthroughs, the irony and humour that can inflect periods of illness, plus the downright drudgery, sadness, frustration, anger, and possibly grief too. How does illness feature in our work, if at all, and where is it silenced? Test what feels comfortable to write about and learn how writing about our health may itself bring benefits to our wellbeing.
Series of Workshops
This is the combination ticket for this series of three Live Online events. They are designed to work as a series, with a successive series of writing exercises to engage with to help develop your story. All ticket types can be found here:
Combination Ticket: Having our voice heard: writing our health and care stories| £75 | All Three Workshops Listed Below
Workshop 1: Your health and care experience: writing what´s within| £30 | Saturday 27th April | 2pm – 4pm, UK Time GMT / UTC
Workshop 2: Finding the right language: health and illness as metaphors| £30 | Saturday 11th May | 2pm – 4pm, UK Time GMT / UTC
Workshop 3: Lay bare the experience? Choosing your perspective on writing a challenging story| £30 | Saturday 25th May | 2pm – 4pm, UK Time BST / UTC+
Learning online
These workshops will take place on Zoom, so you will need to have access to the internet at the times given above. The course tutor will share Zoom links for each session via email. If you wish, you can also read some of the reading resources outside the workshops, but there is no expectation that you will.
Discounted Spots
A discount of £15 has been included in this combination ticket of all three events. If you would like to purchase tickets for these events individually, each event has four half price places and two free place available on a first come first served basis. Please email ennis@londonlitlab.co.uk to let us know if you would like one of these spots. Please note, you can only have one discounted place across all three events.
