We are delighted to offer a variety of short courses on our Educational Learning Platform and thrilled to launch the newest one, Spiral Wind: A Creative Writing Course. This is a real treat, inviting you to dive into and enjoy some creative writing, for whatever reason, whether it be reflection, catharsis, developing ideas, a way to cope with eco anxiety or just for the sheer fun of it.
The course has been written by the talented poet Tom Burgess and leads you gently onto the many paths into the imagination. He has provided a wealth of ideas, tips and prompts to play with, and the course begins with his beautiful contemplation on the power of writing and getting into flow. He says,
“Sometimes you need an invitation to get into writing. Creative writing can seem an odd proposition, from a distance its utility is opaque. In the doing of it though the need for reason falls away. Instead it is flow and it is consciousness revealed, a process of intimacy with yourself that is inherently valuable. We all have stories about ourselves and our ability to write. Fashioned by faltering voyages through education systems we grow into adults that quietly tell ourselves we are not the type of person that writes for pleasure or discovery, that it is the preserve of a particular kind of person. Yet there are so many reasons to take the plunge and write.”
Tom’s poetry collection, Tangled Yet Coiled, was published in 2021, and is available from Arkbound here. It’s also available as an audiobook. It weaves together themes of mental health, nature, climate change and ecological breakdown and he very kindly donates some of the profit from the book to Word Forest. (You can read a little more about that here). With regard to the changing climate and the new reality we are heading into, he believes that imagination will be vital. He writes,
‘With reference to the climate crisis, imagination will be vital to finding a way to live in a new reality and generate needed solutions to problems as they come thick and fast. These solutions will be structural and technological but also vitally, they will be cultural. Culture, where story, words, and myth create change. It is why I love Word Forest, it is the product of imagining a viable future, and it is active in the ushering of this future into reality. After all we have to try, we have to imagine and we have to enter the flow.’
The course has been curated beautifully by our ELP whizz Lindsey Selleck. The link to it is here. Enjoy!
The Team
