- Event Date: 11/03/2026
Health and Illness as Metaphors: Writing Our Health and Care Stories
Event Details
- 14:00
- Online on Zoom
- From £25
Event Description
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.
Please Note:
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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.
Come and play with your creativity in this deeply relaxing and inspiring workshop series! This is a three-part series that will run over three Mondays in February (2, 9, 16), and you can buy tickets for one or all three (details below and in link).
We’ll use a guided relaxation practice called yoga nidra to access divergent thinking (the type of thinking that drives new ideas and possibilities). We’ll combine this with writing prompts to access new ideas in your writing (or other creative practice if you wish).
There will also be time to chat and share your writing (all optional of course).
Everyone welcome!
Date, time & location:
Three Mondays in February, 6–7pm (2/2, 9/2, 16/2)
Live online on Zoom
Individual sessions (£16 per session)
or book all three and save (£45)