Life Writing workshop with Kate Potts (spring term)
Image credit: Venus Major
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise."
~ Sylvia Plath
In five fortnightly in-person sessions we’ll explore considerations and techniques in prose life writing—memoir, autobiography, autofiction, personal essays, and work that crosses boundaries of genre and form.
Focusing on different key aspects of life writing in each session, we will read and discuss a variety of examples including work by Melissa Febos, Bernadine Evaristo, Chris Krauss, Robert Macfarlane, Simon Armitage, Nina Mingya Powles and Patricia Lockwood. Though discussion, short writing prompts and feedback on your own work, you will develop and hone your writing.
The five sessions will focus on (but won’t be limited to) these themes:
1. Exposure and vulnerability: bypassing the internal censor, and dealing with real and imagined criticism
2. Writing about place
3. Character portrayal in life writing
4. Pacing and detail: when to zoom in and zoom out
5. Slipperiness and uncertainty: handling gaps and ambiguity
Though discussion, short writing prompts, ‘homework’ activities and feedback on your own work in a supportive group space, you will develop and hone your writing.
This course is designed for writers with some experience keen to explore the possibilities of life writing or build on work in progress.
Note that, although these sessions build on those in the autumn term, this course can be taken without having attended previous sessions.
Dates: Friday January 23rd to Friday March 20th
Time: 10:00am to 12:30pm
Venue: The Exchange, Stroud GL5 1DF
Fee: £150 / 125 concession
Tutor: Kate Potts
Kate Potts is a poet and freelance lecturer, mentor and editor. She has taught creative writing for Middlesex University, Royal Holloway, Oxford University, Arvon and The Poetry School.
Kate's most recent book is Pretenders (Bloodaxe, 2025), a multi-voice documentary work exploring imposter feelings and imposters. She writes about creative writing and care in her substack Speak Up! On writing, failing better and taking up space.
'As a study of imposter feelings, Pretenders is revelatory: humane in its ability to hold and make space for vulnerability, and altert to the socio-political dynamics that underpin the impulse to self-doubt.' - Sarah Howe
'Kate Potts is one of the foremost writers of our generation.' - Fiona Benson