Lapidus Events

Poetry therapy is the intentional use of poetry and other forms of literature for healing and personal growth. Learn how to introduce therapeutic writing into your work, to help people improve their health and wellbeing.

What will we cover?
The course will explore the use of poems and expressive writing as a tool for self-discovery, creativity and personal development. No previous experience of writing poetry or expressive writing is necessary.

What will I achieve?
By the end of this course you should be able to…
Describe the basic principles of poetry therapy and therapeutic writing.
Explain the difference between creative writing and therapeutic writing.
List three different poetry therapy / therapeutic writing techniques.
Evaluate the importance of a safe and supportive framework for therapeutic writing

When I’ve finished, what course can I do next?
If you would like to continue building your confidence and facilitate groups, you can progress to the advanced level course Working with Therapeutic Writing – Advanced.

Charmaine Pollard qualified as a certified poetry therapist with the USA-based International Federation for Biblio-Poetry Therapy. She is also a BACP registered / accredited counsellor and life coach.
She has a passion for facilitating therapeutic writing groups and workshops in schools, prisons, libraries, clinical settings and in the community. She enjoys teaching at City Lit, as it is a diverse and vibrant place to learn. She especially enjoys introducing students to poetry therapy. Her courses are based on reading poetry discussing, and writing in response to promote health and wellbeing.
Charmaine Pollard is author of Writing for Resilience a workbook that harnesses the power of writing to help boost self-awareness and strengthen resilience. It is available to buy on Amazon.

According to Robert Frost ‘A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.’ Poetry therapy is the intentional use of poetry and literature to support healing, self-awareness, and emotional growth.
This experiential course deepens your understanding of therapeutic writing and equips you to integrate it into your personal practice or professional work. It builds on the teachings and learnings of the introductory course. Its overall aim is to support participants begin to create a framework to facilitate courses and workshops with various populations. Whether you’re a writer, therapist, educator, or healthcare provider, you’ll gain practical tools to help others improve their wellbeing through the written word.

About the Tutor
Charmaine Pollard qualified as a certified poetry therapist with the USA-based International Federation for Biblio-Poetry Therapy. She is also a BACP registered / accredited counsellor and life coach. She has a passion for facilitating therapeutic writing groups and workshops in schools, prisons, libraries, clinical settings and in the community.
She enjoys teaching at City Lit, as it is a diverse and vibrant place to learn. She especially enjoys introducing students to poetry therapy. Her courses are based on reading poetry discussing, and writing in response to promote health and wellbeing.
Charmaine Pollard is author of Writing for Resilience a workbook that harnesses the power of writing to help boost self-awareness and strengthen resilience. It is available to buy on Amazon.

Take a mindful pause in your week and join us for Write Here, Right Now — a calm, supportive online space for Lapidus members to come together and write.

Hosted once a month on a Wednesday lunchtime, this hour-long session offers a simple structure: a warm welcome from a Lapidus facilitator, a chance to briefly connect with fellow members, and then uninterrupted self-directed writing time. Whether you’re journalling, reflecting, or working on a creative project, writing in the quiet company of others can bring focus, motivation, and a sense of shared purpose.

We meet on Zoom. No pressure, no prompts — just you, your words, and a community that understands the power of writing for wellbeing.

Event details

This edition of Write Here, Right Now takes place on Wednesday 11th March 2026, from 1pm –2pm GMT (UK time).

The facilitator will be Alison Cable.

Please send any questions ahead of the event to membership@lapidus.org.uk (responses on Tuesdays & Fridays).

For queries on the day of the event, please contact magazine@lapidus.org.uk.

Joining the event

There is no need to reserve your space — simply turn up on the day using the Zoom link below:

Joining link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86378002881

Meeting ID: 863 7800 2881

In this workshop, reclaim your voice. Begin testing out what you have to say, and experiment with new metaphors and motifs to do justice to the vastness of your health or care story.

Here our focus is on finding a language, style and voice for your writing about health and illness that best reflects your story. How might you capture living with an illness, being disabled, or providing care using words that adequately reflect the complexity of your experience?

We’ll consider the expressive potential of creative writing as a corrective to prejudice and ignorance. We will also explore texts that write beyond the simple binaries of being well and unwell, life and death, fighter or victim. Contemporary works which upend conventional norms around writing about health and illness will be a stimulus in the reading material we draw from.

Course Outline
– Session two of a series of live zoom workshops, beginning on February 18th, with tutor of expressive and therapeutic writing, and coach, Andrew Kauffmann. Including a combination of reading, discussion and writing exercises.

– Reading material provided outside of the Zoom session

– Resources on telling your story within safe boundaries and the benefits to expressive writing on health and care experiences

Content rooted in the social model of disability, open to all people with health and care needs, and those who provide care

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. Neither will there be any expectations around sharing what you’ve written with other participants. There will be an added focus in this coming series on writing in a range of experimental forms, mixing genres and without constraints or concern for convention on how we might write our story.

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” Aldous Huxley
Writing Coffee and Conversation—a welcoming event for anyone interested in self-reflective writing, journaling, and poetry.
Join us as we use carefully selected poems to inspire our reflections and discussions.
Our focus is on self-discovery and self-improvement.
We meet at selected bespoke cafés and places of interest across London, using these inspiring venues as a jumping-off point for our writing.
You don’t need to worry about spelling, grammar, style, or having any background in poetry or expressive writing. Just bring your curiosity and willingness to connect, reflect and experiment with words in a friendly and supportive environment.

About the Facilitator:
Charmaine Pollard is an experienced Certified Poetry Therapist, Counsellor and Life Coach with a passion for leading writing and poetry therapy workshops with a particular focus on self-awareness, confidence and resilience.
Her fusion of contemporary coaching with poetry therapy techniques have helped people from all walks of life, find self- compassion, contentment and success.

Humming Home is a 2-hour therapeutic writing workshop exploring belonging, homeland, and the journey home, wherever that may be.

Through gentle breathing and humming practices, poetry from across cultures, and guided writing prompts inspired by Toni Morrison, Mahmoud Darwish, Joy Harjo and others, you are invited to slow down, listen inward, and reconnect with a felt sense of home. Humming, an instinctive, soothing sound, becomes both a mindfulness practice and a metaphor for the liminal spaces we move through as we leave, return, and redefine where we belong.

Facilitated by María Ortega García, PTP, from https://mariaortegagarcia.com

A series of monthly workshops that can help you explore feelings, and build your resilience as you connect with others in these challenging times.

The title theme for the workshops was inspired by a poem written by Deborah Cooper.

We will use carefully selected poems as a springboard for writing, reflection and conversations.
The workshops are for anyone who wants additional resources, in these unsettling times. It is for those who enjoy creativity, journalling, writing for personal or professional development.

No prior knowledge of poetry or expressive writing is required; you simply need to be willing to share, reflect and experiment with words in a supportive environment.

In this 60-minute reflective writing workshop, we explore how personal experience — especially experiences of loss, transition, and emotional strain — can be approached through metaphor.
Rather than writing directly about “what happened,” participants will experiment with writing around their experience: through objects, spaces, textures, and embodied imagery.
Grounded in principles of therapeutic and expressive writing, this session offers a contained, psychologically informed space for reflection. It is not therapy, but it invites depth, curiosity, and careful listening to what language makes possible.

Open to writers of all levels. No prior writing experience required.

This is a five week online course starting Tuesday 14th April, 7-9pm. £175 Bursaries available. Please inquire.

This course will look at poems from poets (or their families) who have been displaced from their homeland, and exploring and experiencing the new insights and beautiful alchemy these poems work on us.

Each session will look at two poets, and time will be given to feel deeper into the poems with all our senses, and time to write your own response to the poem, and a chance to share it in a supportive community of writers. These writers of multi-ethnic and multi-lingual backgrounds fresh insights and portals into deeper perspectives on ourselves and our lives.

Led by Poet, Poetry Healing Practitioner, Focusing Teacher, Bethany Rivers (M.A.). She is mixed race and neurodivergent. She has two poetry chapbooks published with Indigo Dreams (Off the wall), and Fly on the Wall Press (the sea refuses no river). She is author of Fountain of Creativity: Ways to nourish your writing from Victorina Press, and has been teaching creative writing and writing for wellbeing for 20 years.

Photo is of Lorenzo Quinn’s sculpture Building Bridges.

Discover how poetry can become a powerful tool for healing, insight, and self-expression. This 5-week online course combines theory with guided writing practices to help you explore your story through imagery, metaphor, and creative language; no poetry experience needed!

Each week you’ll receive evidence-based readings and simple writing invitations to explore in your own time, plus live sessions where we write, reflect, and connect in a supportive space. Drawing on therapeutic writing research and the work of leaders such as Mazza, Pennebaker, McAdams, and Chavis, the course shows how poetry can support emotional well-being, identity exploration, and personal growth.

You’ll experiment with poetic forms that help you reconnect with your body, reframe old narratives, and imagine new possibilities for your future. By the end, you’ll have a sustainable expressive writing practice and a deeper understanding of how poetry can support healing, creativity, and self-knowledge.

Who it’s for: anyone curious about therapeutic writing or poetry as a therapeutic tool, new or experienced writers, and those seeking a creative, reflective space for personal insight.

Book directly here: https://buy.stripe.com/7sY9AS3620aYckA2UwenS07
Check out the full program: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nn5N9RQqPycapNthFVMHW0jaBhApn7JGpFr1U3hJgVI/edit?usp=sharing
Find more about my training, experience and facilitation: https://mariaortegagarcia.com

Concession rate: £89 — https://buy.stripe.com/5kQbJ0cGC3na3O40MoenS08

If your body could speak, what would it say? Have you ever had a conversation with it on the page?

In this 2-hour workshop, we’ll explore ways to connect with our bodies and hear their voices through writing. Kate will also share learnings from her MSc research on mind-body writing and reflections on how the research still shapes her life all these years later.

As part of the workshop:

– We’ll explore activities to help us connect with our bodies through writing
– We’ll take some time for relaxation and reflection
– Kate will share her research findings, their impact and additional learnings 10 years on

You can find out more and book here: https://www.katemcbarron.co.uk/conversations-with-our-bodies/

Take a mindful pause in your week and join us for Write Here, Right Now — a calm, supportive online space for Lapidus members to come together and write.

Hosted once a month on a Wednesday lunchtime, this hour-long session offers a simple structure: a warm welcome from a Lapidus facilitator, a chance to briefly connect with fellow members, and then uninterrupted self-directed writing time. Whether you’re journalling, reflecting, or working on a creative project, writing in the quiet company of others can bring focus, motivation, and a sense of shared purpose.

We meet on Zoom. No pressure, no prompts — just you, your words, and a community that understands the power of writing for wellbeing.

Event details

This edition of Write Here, Right Now takes place on Wednesday 13th May 2026, from 1pm –2pm BST (UK time).

The facilitator will be Gina Beach.

Please send any questions ahead of the event to membership@lapidus.org.uk (responses on Tuesdays & Fridays).

Joining the event

There is no need to reserve your space — simply turn up on the day using the Zoom link below:

Joining link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89853372151

Meeting ID: 898 5337 2151

We are all born with a wild imagination. It is through this unlimited resource that we can access the unconscious, connect with our intuition, develop a greater degree of self-awareness and expand our sense of possibility. Fire Your Wild Imagination will be a chance to explore this vast inner superpower through the Jungian-inspired process of depth writing – a transformational practice aimed at nurturing depth of connection with self and world via the depths of the creative psyche. It will take place the beautiful cork woods of Portugal’s Alentejo region under the gentle guidance of Dr Rachel Newsome.

Who is Fire Your Wild Imagination for?
The focus of Fire Your Wild Imagination is on process, rather than outcome, and on what comes up in the writing, rather than craft. This retreat is for writers, creative & therapeutic practitioners and those on a journey of self-discovery who are curious about how writing & imagination can be used to support transformative growth and who are comfortable with diving deeper.

What will we be doing?
There will be two daily writing workshops on each of the three full days of the retreat. The morning workshops will be a chance to fire your wild imagination through attuning to your curious inner child, your sage inner guide and the wisdom of nature. In the afternoon you’ll have plenty free time to explore the cork woods or relax by the infinity pool. The day will finish with a reflective workshop focused on exploring your experiences of the morning session and any insights arising from it more deeply. Both sessions will include guided writing prompts as well as sharing and discussion.

A note about care
Throughout the retreat you’ll be invited to take responsibility for your experience by taking from the material what you need and working with it at a level that feels right for you. You’ll also be invited to practice CARE – confidentiality, attention, respect & empathy – with others. For those who have a writing or other creative practice, depth-writing can be used as an adjacent activity to support, deepen and expand your projects. Wherever you are at, this retreat is a chance to fire the creative, healing superpower of the wild imagination which courses through all of us.

Cost (includes accommodation, vegetarian meals & writing workshops)
Luxury room single use: 1,000 Euros
Luxury room sharing: 850 Euros pp
Budget room single use: 650 Euros
Budget room sharing: 550 Euros pp
Deposit: 150 Euros
*The deposit is refundable up to May 1st 2026. Outstanding payments are due by July 31st 2026.

Getting there by plane: The nearest airport to Monte da Japonica is Lisbon. A pick can be arranged from the airport direct to Monte da Japonica for 50 Euros per person. Alternatively, you can get the bus to the nearest town of Redondo or a train to the nearest city of Evora. There is a small charge for a pick up from Evora. Pick up from Redondo is free.

About Dr Rachel Newsome
I’m a writer, speaker & creative guide with Jungian arts-based PhD in writing-as-inner-work. I have a background in both the media and academia and now run a programme of depth writing courses and workshops throughout the year aimed at nurturing depth of connection with our deep creative self. I’m a Seed Talks expert speaker, serve on the Editorial Team of the London Arts-Based Research Centre and am co-Editor of forthcoming Routledge publication The Creative Psyche: Between Self & Spirit. I write about my travels between worlds on my Substack, Dreaming Awake. And, as you can probably tell, I love to dive deep.

https://rachelnewsome.co.uk/
https://drrachelnewsome.substack.com/