Spring and Early Summer Work

I’ve had a busy and enjoyable few weeks mostly facilitating writing retreats and creative writing for academics workshops (with a conference paper thrown into the mix too): 

Academic Writing Retreat for colleagues from the Institute of Education, Sciences, University of Plymouth (14^th-15^th May 2025) 

Academic Writing Retreat for colleagues from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Greenwich (2^nd-5^th June 2025) 

‘Auto/Biographical Reflections on Death and Loss Across the Lifecourse (some personal reflections and discussion of publishing opportunities)’ (Workshop) Centre for Death and Dying (CDAS) University of Bath Annual Conference (13^th June 2025) 

‘Creative Writing for Academics: methodologies, motivations and impacts’ Workshop for the International Security and Sustainability and the Gender Research Group, Nottingham Trent University (17^th June 2025) 

You’re a Woman who Writes: Workshop on navigating your writing identity (with Bethan Michael-Fox, Open University and Halle Merrick, Falmouth University) Contemporary Women’s Writing Association Conference, Falmouth University (18^th June 2025) 

‘Living to Write or Writing to Live’: one woman’s reflections’ Paper presented at the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association Conference, Falmouth University (18^th June 2025) 

More to come in the next few weeks… 

If you are interested in knowing about Retreats and Workshops please take a look at my website www.gayle.letherby.co.uk OR email me at: gayle.letherby@plymouth.ac.uk enquires@gayle-letherby.co.uk 

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I often start Retreats and Workshops with a free-writing exercise. Free-writing has many benefits and can help the writer to:   

•      Get something on a blank page / warm up the writing muscles

•      Overcome inner censors

•      Follow a stream of consciousness without trying for logic

•      Move away from other kinds of writing (academic, correspondence, professional etc)

It can enable us to:  

•      Find the/OUR ‘self’ in our writing

•      Discover thoughts we generally keep deeply hidden

•      Write Ourself/ves out of a block or bind

•      Get to know a character / play with a new idea 

The writing doesn’t need to make sense, can be clumsy and cliched, repetitive and contradictory…. The ‘aim’ (but as I’ve said there are no rules) is to keep writing including … or ‘I’m stuck’ or similar, rather than stopping. Free-writing can be done with pen and paper, or on a phone or a laptop. It can include images in addition to words. 

Sometimes, as I’ve written previously, I follow this exercise with one were participants use some of the words shared by others to write a piece of memoir or fiction, a poem or a song… Here’s the piece I wrote at one of the workshops above with the words of others underlined: 

It’s a beautiful afternoon; full of sunshine, seagulls and lawnmowers. I’m indoors, not stuck, but happily so, not engaging in procrastination, but writing alongside my workshop participants for this exercise I’ve set: ‘write something, anything, using at least eight words from others’. I’m on Teams. The workshop participants are together in a room at their institution. We’ve got past the inevitable technical hiccup and all in quiet and calm. There’s cake for them.  I’ve just expressed my feelings of disappointment at not being able to share in the treat. It’s enriching to be with people in this way. To be working together, thinking together like this about different ways to work, to share beyond the traditional quoting and counting. To find order or bring creative chaos. Everything, anything is possible. What a positive way to spend an afternoon.