In this two hour master class we will centre on facets of place writing informed by anti-colonial re-enchantment of land, place, and home.
28th of April, 2024. 7pm GMT £25, tickets via Eventbrite
I’ll share practical tips for forming or renewing a sense of place in your writing. Together we’ll examine our places, sharing discoveries and challenges as a group, exploring forces shaping our place-writing from gentrification to the Scottish Diaspora, and more. There will be prompts and inspiration for future work.
I bring decades of experience teaching writing to my online workshops. I’ve taught at the University of California and Colleges in the US, delivered community writing workshops as well as master classes for the Taibhsear Collective.
Paid subscribers to my Substack receive a 20%discount cod
Find out about past and upcoming workshops at my Workshops page.
Writing as Ritual is a two hour masterclass for people are writing for publication as well as writers who are embarking on or renewing a writing journey.
In decades spent facing the blank page, sometimes I’ve been dormant and other times I’ve needed to jumpstart my practice, and that’s changed over time. I’m going to be sharing ideas about my journey, also things I’ve learned over the last 30 years about maintaining a practice. In this video up at my Substack, I talk about what this workshop is about and what you can expect,
We will be writing together for about 45 minutes. I will have some prompts to inspire you. You can also bring anything you are currently writing or would like to journal about. I will be writing with you and holding space for your work.
You might like to light a candle and set out any objects that want to be with you during the hour, but this is optional.
In this two hour workshop we will use the iconography of the tarot’s major arcana as prompts to memory and personal narrative.
You don’t need to know how to read tarot to participate, but those who do work with tarot will find a new way to use your insights with this divination tool to broaden and deepen your writing.
I have thirty years of experience working with tarot. As a child, my first conversations with the cards were as a mysterious game. In this workshop we will rekindle a bit of this wonder as we delve into our pasts on the page.
This workshop is a safe space for women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people. While we may discuss our writing process, any sharing of our written work will be voluntary.
At the end of the workshop you will have sketched out a short piece of memoir writing with a plan for development and revision.
You will need paper and pen, or something to input text. The major arcana cards from a personal tarot deck is optional—an online deck is available here. https://randomtarotcard.com
Allyson Shaw brings ten years of experience teaching writing at University of California and city colleges in the USA. She has delivered numerous community based workshops throughout her career, including online workshops for the Taibhsear Collective. Recent publications include Fireside Quarterly, Rituals and Declarations, and Fiddlers Green. Her creative nonfiction book, Ashes and Stones: a Scottish journey in search for witches and witness, will be published by Sceptre, the literary imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, in January 2023.
Stefan Eggeler illustration for Gustav Meyrink’s Walpurgisnacht
My newest workshop, Reclaiming Our Monsters, pushes boundaries and clears space for subversive imagination. There are still some spaces left–tickets availableat Eventibrite. April 30th, 7pm GMT via Zoom.
This workshop is driven by feminist ideas, reworking the monstrous into new empowering guises. It’s also a way to explore folk horror as a wider genre with space for women and non-binary people.
April 30th is the second Halloween of the witches’ calendar. The veil is thin, the dead walk among us, werewolves are born and all good witches fly to the Brocken.
In films, TV and books I’ve always had sympathy with the demonised feminine. I drank up the power in these images, and it has served me well. Not that I’m older, I realise this was a kind of crone-medicine. The crone embraces a lived duality: she knows what she is, are even if the dominant culture and history says she’s extraneous, voiceless and grotesque.
There is a lot going on in the world right now that is truly monstrous. In times of upheaval and uncertainty, what messages do we amplify and share? What realities do we tend? Writing through disaster capitalism and the death throes of patriarchy isn’t a hobby or pastime, it’s a mode of survival and resistance.
How do we know who we are? Write must it—Write it out like the Cailleach on a night raid with her retinue of the dead. Writing it out like a spell, like a draught of blood.
From where I stand writing may be my only power against the forces of destruction that envelop us. It is the sword I have sharpened over decades in the forge of my own raging intellect, my furious imagination.
Teaching is my vocation. It’s a devotional work for me and something I’ve done in and outside of hallowed halls of academia and on the streets and in community centres. I’m thrilled that technology, though far from perfect, allows me to teach others online across the world.
In this two hour workshop we’ll explore the monstrous through an intimate, personal perspective. We’ll embrace the persona of the outsider, the not-quite-human, using subversive world-building, and writing through the eyes of the cursed, the spellbound, the exiled. You’ll need pen, paper and a six sided dice. Join us!
Online via Zoom, April 30th, 7pm gmt Tickets are £25 available from Eventbrite
In this two hour workshop we’ll explore the monstrous through an intimate, personal perspective. We’ll embrace the persona of the outsider, the not-quite-human, using subversive world-building, and writing through the eyes of the cursed, the spellbound, the exiled.
April 30th is the second Halloween of the witches’ calendar. The veil is thin, the dead walk among us, werewolves are born and all good witches fly to the Brocken.
Let’s celebrate and write stories together.
For this workshop you’ll need a pen, paper and a six sided die.
This workshop is driven by feminist ideas, reworking the monstrous into new empowering guises—but also a way to explore folk horror as a wider genre with space for women and non binary people. Every workshop I design is an offering of community, creative fuel and fire to the writers and makers around me. And this one is GONNA BE HELLA FUN.
My next writing workshop will be on Sunday, February 27th at 7pm GMT. This two hour workshop will explore rendering a sense of place in writing. Exercises will centre on facets of setting informed by notions of the Scottish diaspora and an anti-colonial re-enchantment of land, place, and home. Numbers will be very limited, with five spaces reserved for patrons. Tickets are £25 Book your place via the Eventbrite workshop page.
This is the first in a series of creative writing master classes focusing on new nature writing, folklore and ritual through the lens of technique. These writing classes will be aimed at serious writers and creatives, regardless of previous writing experience.
I have a core of brilliant subscribers who show their support on Patreon. This month, after Storm Arwen took off part of my roof, they literally helped keep a roof over my head.
To show my thanks I’m rolling out new benefits for all patrons—whether you have been with me from the start or are joining today!
*Discounts for online writing workshops I’ll be hosting in the new year.
*Monthly community Q&A Hangouts via Zoom. (Hangouts will be 7pm GMT, which is 11am PST, 2pm EST and 8am in New Zealand, etc.—[the world is mostly awake.]) The meetings will be a chance for this vibrant, creative community to talk about what we are working on and thinking about.
This Patreon tier is $5 a month, payable in your country’s currency. You can join up here.
NOTE–These workshops have sold out. Please contact Taibhsear Collective to be added to a waiting list.
Very excited to be teaching a series of writing workshops for Winters last.
Dr. Alice Tarbuck will be teaching the first three workshops in the series, and I’ll be teaching the last three workshops, the Secrets of Our Craft:
Calling Corners: a crash course in first lines, new habits and starting out. In this workshop we will discuss ways to face the blank page, modes of creating a writing ritual for yourself and as well as warding your practice in the face of upheaval and uncertain times.
Temporal Shifts: a guide to writing as the ultimate time travel. In this workshop we will look at the element of time in storytelling, using non-linear narrative and foreshadowing to build excitement and movement into our work.
Second Sight: a hands-on workshop to help you see old work in new ways. Revision is a mode of perceiving possibilities and it is the secret to powerful writing. In this workshop we will look at techniques for re-visioning– getting a second look at your first drafts and developing all your raw wildlings into powerful writing that embodies your intentions.
Allyson Shaw, Author of Ashes and Stones 