Every year Clare Shaw and I run the January Writing Hours. They have traditionally been in the morning, 10am till 11am, every day throughout January. I think I can speak for Clare as well when I say that the January Writing Hours are the highlight of our year. We get ridiculously excited in that grey period where nothing happens between Christmas Day and New Years Eve, because we’re busy planning 31 workshops.
The Writing Hours are mass participation events. This January, we regularly had over 250 people on the zoom call.
We know 10am doesn’t work for everybody. It worked for us, me in particular because it meant I could run the Writing Hours and also not miss out on dropping my little girl off at school. But picking any time makes it accessible for some people and inaccessible for others. As we couldn’t find a way of splitting ourselves in half during January, I decided to trial a mini version of the January Writing Hours - the Late Night Writing Hours! These will take place between 9pm and 10pm each night from the 8th to the 12th July.
The cost is £15 for all five sessions or £5 for one session. If you would like to come but can’t otherwise afford to, there are also some bursary tickets for £1. Please spread the word if you can!
You can book by clicking on this link: Late Night Writing Hours
If you haven’t been to a Writing Hour before, they are a kind of light touch workshop. There is no reading back of anything you’ve created. It’s just an hour that you take out of your day to sit and write. I’ll bring along poems that I’ve enjoyed reading and I’ll screenshare them with you. I might talk about the poem - the line breaks, the approach to language. Then I’ll give you a prompt which you are free to follow or ignore. We usually look at between two and four poems in the Writing Hours - and spend most of the hour writing. It’s a way of holding yourself accountable, of writing alongside lots of other writers across the UK and further afield.
The sessions will take place on Zoom, and I hope to see you there!
I can't make these dates but I'd love to join another time - please do it again!