Teaching
Introducing Earth Dialogue for School of the Wild, Sussex Downs, Imbolc 2019
I teach many different approaches to creative non-fiction writing and radical kinship with the -more-than-human world in a time of unravelling. I work mostly in collaboration with writers, artists, academics, activists and changemakers, to help create bridges between disciplines and spark connections and conversations. The focus of the workshops range from cultural change to the mythos, plant communications, and forging a practice in response to encounters with the Earth.
These ensemble gatherings provide a chance for diverse groups of people to share stories, rekindle a physical and imaginative relationship with life, and take part in solo journeys, group discussions and map-making.
In the last decade I’ve taught residential courses and workshops, with organisations such as Arvon (with theatre maker Lucy Neal) and Schumacher College (with the Dark Mountain core team). Much of the work is based on a search for a shared lexicon to reconnect with the sentient Earth (see When the Mountain Speaks With Us). I’ve held Conversations in the Dark in Macclesfield, hosted cultural mapmaking in a folk high school in Denmark and The Hidden Civil War in Newcastle upon Tyne, sparked creative interchanges for Fire in the Mountain festival and run online sessions with Writers Rebel and School of the Wild.
Recently I’ve also held creative writing workshops at universities (see Uneasy Chair below) to bridge the gap between different academic and creative disciplines in order to facilitate intellectual alliances and deeper perception of the trouble we are in.
With Dark Mountain Project, I’ve co-produced a series of online nonfiction writing workshops with fellow co-director Nick Hunt and a year-long series of creative workshops How We Walk Through the Fire with Dougie Strang, based around the solar ancestral year.
This year my residential teaching has included The Labyrinth and the Dancing Floor at Schumacher College in Devon in June and Dark Ocean with Sail Britain in the Hebrides in July.
The two main strands of teaching I run are The Uneasy Chair (writing) and Earth Dialogues (connection with the more-than-human world), though often these strands interweave.
The Uneasy Chair
The Uneasy Chair is not about teaching people to be professional writers but about writing as an existential practice, as a way of perceiving the world and your place in it, about putting your feet on the Earth and a crooked thing straight, about collaboration and time and attention, and many other things besides.
Do our words matter? Can the act of writing redirect the course of our lives? By activating our imaginations and speaking out, can we change the cultural stories and myths by which we live, individually and collectively?
These creative non-fiction workshops are for all those looking to discover some key tools for navigating rocky times, from making meaning and broadening our collaboration skills, to laying down some tracks to restore the world and co-create a different kind of future.
On the uneasy boulder at Camp Breakdown Breakdown with Nick Hunt, Scotland 2014
During the workshops we explore how to listen to different voices (human and non-human), how to work with real life material, how to find our own 'medicine story', and how to sustain a writing practice in times of urgency. This includes 'tech share' and exercises, myth telling and story-sharing, and combines group work around a fire, by a river or under trees and stars, with time for individual contemplation and writing.
The sessions can take place in many kinds of places and times and often in synch with the ‘stone clock’ of the ancestral year. I’ve sat on many uneasy logs and pavements with changemakers and activists: from the melee of COP21 in Paris to a rainy field in Aberdeenshire for Camp Breakdown Break Down; from Flights of Imagination with the Natural Beekeeping Trust at midsummer to recordkeeping with the Walking Forest collective at winter solstice.
For the online workshops
Ranging from one or two sessions, or a course of six
These follow a similar pattern to the in person workshops. Over the participatory sessions we look at how to forge a writing practice that can hold uncertainty, and widen our attentiveness to the more-than-human world. Between the sessions, we then walk into our local territories – urban or rural, civilised or wild – to help us ground these words, and ourselves, as the year shifts from darkness into light and back again. We then ‘show and tell’ what we have encountered in a creative form.
Earth Dialogues
Earth Dialogues are essentially communications between the natural world and your own physical intelligence.
Part discussion, part encounter, part perception exercise, an Earth Dialogue is an opportunity to engage, individually and as a group, with a wild place, at a certain time of year, as well as the challenging times we are living in.
Setting off for an Earth Dialogue, Carrying the Fire, Rannoch Moor, Scotland, Samhain 2015
It enables you to shift your attention away from a busy mindset and sense of isolation, and instead behold the planet as a key participant.
This dialogue is a way of experiencing the Earth not as ‘landscape’ or ‘the environment’, but as a meeting place of many elements, in which human beings form one particular strand. Its core act is learning how to tune into and physically connect with a place and all its inhabitants - plants, creatures, wind, stones.
It involves sharing your experience afterwards, using the tools of listening, speaking, holding space, keeping time and remembering; and finally, turning those insights into images or words and creating a collaborative 'dreaming map' of the day.
Dialogues begin with introductions and instructions for making contact with the land, followed by an hour of solo time outside. You then return to discuss your encounters and together we'll create a shared map.
Working as a group allows us to makes more sense of the land we live in together and strengthens our connections, as well as our presence, within it.
The Earth Dialogue is one of a set of practices developed over a decade that explore the territory of dreams, myths, places and plants. It has been shared with people in many locations: up a mountain in California, around a loch on Rannoch Moor, in the Calder Valley in England, in the depths of a winter forest in Sweden.
Mapping the forest, Sweden, Winter Solstice, 2017