My newest workshop, Reclaiming Our Monsters, pushes boundaries and clears space for subversive imagination. There are still some spaces left–tickets available at 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!