January Writing Hours 2025

They're back!

For the fourth year running, January Writing Hours are back!

For those of you that haven’t experienced the January Writing Hours before, back in 2021, Clare and I decided that as January was such a dreary month (Christmas is over, weather is rubbish etc) we would cheer ourselves up by running a one hour ‘light' touch’ workshop every morning throughout the whole of January.

If you would like to join us, we will be meeting online at 10am every morning on Zoom. For £70 you can join in every morning, which works out at less than £2.30 a day. I think. Maths are not my strong point! We also have £25 tickets for each week in January if you have other commitments - this works out at under £3.60 a day. We have pay-what-you-can tickets for those people who would like to come and can’t afford to, and finally we have bursary tickets which are completely free. If you can’t afford to come at all, then please take one of our free tickets.

You can find the link to book a place here at the January Writing Hours.

If you’ve got any questions, please read through the ‘frequently asked questions’ that I’ve just invented below, and if you have any other questions, comment below!

What happens during a January Writing Hour?

You’ll log onto Zoom and at 10am, we’ll throw open the virtual doors. You will stampede into the Zoom room with lots of other poets and writers. Either Clare or myself, or sometimes both will share a poem with you, talk about why we like it and then we’ll set you off on a writing exercise. This will happen between two and four times throughout the hour.

What if I don’t want to use your exercise, can I just sit and write my own thing!
Yes, absolutely! You can listen to some or all of the exercises. If you don’t want to listen to any more of us wittering, you can mute us.

Will I have to share any of my work?

No, this is not a workshop where we ask participants to share work. We may invite people to use the chat function on Zoom in response to a specific question, but we don’t ask people to share their poems. We want to create a space for an hour where people can just write without worrying about the next stage of showing their work to anybody.

What do you mean by ‘light-touch?’

This is not a workshop in the sense that we will be giving feedback on your work or going into in-depth poetic craft or techniques - although discussions of craft may come up as we present poems. It’s a fast-moving workshop that’s designed to contain multiple prompts so that if one doesn’t work for you, you can move onto the next. We don’t expect you to finish poems during the session, we hope to give you ideas that you can continue to work on in your own time.

How come it’s so cheap?

The January Writing Hours are based on a mass participation model. We can run the Writing Hours this way because it’s popular and has been building year on year.

So how many bursary tickets will you give out this year?

Last year, we managed to give away 93 free tickets to writers who needed them and 134 pay-what-you-can tickets were bought. We hope to at least top this total this year, but it will depend on the amount of fee-paying tickets we sell.

How do I get a bursary ticket? Do you need any proof?

Having spent many hours filling out forms in the past to prove we were on low incomes to access courses and attend various writing events, we believe that poets should be trusted. We don’t believe in humiliating people by asking for proof or explanations. If you need a bursary ticket or a discounted ticket please just go to our Eventbrite and take one.

We want to improve accessibility in the arts and believe this is one small step that we can take. We also know that our community is enriched by opening as many doors as we can so that writers who have been left outside for financial reasons can come inside.

Why is it at 10am? I can’t make that time!

We’ve chosen the time of 10am so that Kim can take her daughter to school, and Clare can rise from their bed. We are aware that any time we chose would exclude some people - please keep your eye out as at sporadic and as yet undecided times there will be some Late Night Writing Hours as well.

Can you send me a recording if I miss a Writing Hour?

We don’t record the Writing Hours for a number of reasons. Firstly, because we want to preserve the spontaneity and privacy of the workshop. These Writing Hours will only ever happen once, each one will be different and will not be replicated and that’s what makes them special. We also don’t have the capacity to save recordings and send them out to people.

Could you send me the poems and exercises that you use?

We can’t do this either - firstly because we don’t have the admin capacity. Secondly, we would like to encourage those taking part to seek out the work of the writers we feature by buying their books or asking their local library to get the book in. If we distributed poems to lots of people, we would run up against copyright issues.

Can you teach me how to use Zoom?

Sadly not, we don’t have the capacity for Zoom lessons. We urge all participants to work out how to use Zoom before the Writing Hours starts.

Will there be captions?

Last year, we ran into a problem when trying to hook Otter up to Zoom. We will try again this year, but if it doesn’t work, we will be using Zoom captions and also screensharing all poems used during the sessions.

Why is Kim the best?

This is just a test question to see if Clare has read to the bottom of this post!

See you all in January!

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