- Event Date: 01/10/2025
Fire Your Wild Imagination: 5 day Portugal depth writing retreat, October 1st – 5th
Event Details
- 14:00
- Monte da Japonica, Alentejo, Portugal
- From £495
Event Description
We are all born with a wild imagination. It is through this unlimited creative 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 a holistic practice underpinned by Jungian psychology, creative writing and journaling designed to facilitate creativity, foster self-discovery & facilitate transformative growth with the gentle guidance of Dr Rachel.
Fire Your Wild Imagination will include daily depth writing workshops focused on cultivating creativity through attuning to your curious inner child, your wise inner sage and the wisdom of nature. The retreat will take place at the rustic and charming historic family home of Monte da Japonica and its surrounding cork woods.
The retreat is for writers, creative & therapeutic practitioners, seekers, inner explorers and those on a journey of self-discovery who are curious about how writing & imagination can be used to support transformative growth and would like to dive deeper. The focus of the retreat will be on process, rather than outcome, and on what comes up in the writing, rather than craft and you’ll be invited to work with the material at a level that feels right for you. 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 that courses through all of us.
Cost: single & shared rooms from £495 (For individual room costs, send me an email)
Deposit: £125
About Rachel
Rachel Newsome, PhD, is an independent writer, teacher and creative guide with twenty years of experience as a former lecturer in Higher Education. She holds a Jungian arts-based doctorate in Creative Writing and delivers a programme of depth writing offerings aimed at supporting transformational growth in others. She is Co-Editor of forthcoming Routledge publication ‘The Creative Psyche: Between Matter & Spirit’ and is regular speaker for the UK public education platform Seed Talks. She is author of Depth Writing with Dr Rachel on Substack and serves on the London Arts-Based Research Centre editorial team.
Please Note:
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Farmacological fictions. The limits of bibliotherapy
Presenter: Jurgen Pieters
Saturday 6th September, Time TBC.
In this talk I want to discuss work in progress in which I look at a number of scenes in novels in which the effects of reading are quite ambivalent, not simply positive or therapeutic as current reflections on bibliotherapy have us believe. I want to argue, though, that theories and practices of bibliotherapy do well to take into account the fact that literary writings can serve as medicine as well as poison. They are ‘farmacological’ objects, in the meaning given to that term by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler: their effects can be positive and negative simultaneously.
About the Presenter
Jürgen Pieters is Professor of Literature at Ghent University (Belgium), where he coordinates the international network CHARM (Consortium of Health Humanities, Arts, Reading and Medicine). He is the author of Literature and Consolation. Fictions of Comfort (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a new book about the use of literary writings in contexts of care.
Zoom Link
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87915127798
About the Lapidus Living Research Community
The Lapidus Living Research Community (LLRC) meets on the first Saturday of every month via Zoom to discuss all things research, with a focus on qualitative arts-based research practices, theory and methods.
All Lapidus members are welcome, regardless of research experience. FREE AND NO TICKETS REQUIRED. Use the Zoom link above to access the event.
Ever drafted a letter in your head you never meant to send? To yourself, your younger self, someone long gone, or not yet met? Writers have long mined this private, potent form: Baldwin, Kincaid, Plath, and plenty more.
This workshop invites you to write from the inside out. We’ll start with short readings—monologues, poems, letters from the likes of the authors mentioned below—and use them to spark our own creative responses. Funny, fierce, reflective, or raw, there’s no right tone, only your own.
Week 1: Voice & Echo – Where our thoughts circle and split (Woolf, Rankine)
Week 2: Letters Never Sent – Honest, unsent missives to self and others (Baldwin, Plath)
Week 3: Soliloquy & Confession – Unfiltered speech and theatrical turns (Shakespeare, Browning)
Week 4: The Inner Chorus – Who else is in there, and what do they want? (Didion, Vuong, Davis)
Come write. No critique. Just good company, good writing time, and possibly some surprising revelations.
We all have them—that inner murmur, mutter, monologue. Sometimes it’s wise, sometimes it’s way off. Literature is full of these inner voices, from Woolf’s fluid consciousness to Shakespeare’s solitary speakers to Baldwin’s unposted letters.
In this writing series, we tune in. Each week, we’ll read a short, vivid piece—monologue, letter, poem or fragment from the likes of the authors mentioned below—and use it as a spark for our own creative writing. Expect wordplay, unexpected turns, and the occasional flash of insight.
Week 1: Voice and Echo – Fragments, contradictions, layered selves (Woolf, Beckett, Rankine)
Week 2: Letters Never Sent – Writing to the past self, the future self, the imagined other (Baldwin, Kincaid)
Week 3: Soliloquy & Confession – Talking out loud when no one’s supposed to hear (Shakespeare, Browning, Carson)
Week 4: The Inner Chorus – Giving shape to the internal tug-of-war (Didion, Vuong, Davis)
No critique, no need to share—unless you want to. Just bring a pen, a curious mind, and your self.