BIG Feels – SOLD OUT

BIG Feels: a queer writing retreat

Queer emotion has often been dismissed, unacknowledged or mocked—even purposely erased and necessarily hidden. Literature is one place we can turn for ‘fellow feeling’ and recognition of our ‘big feels’. This course invites you to explore how to represent emotion in writing projects, through techniques found across forms, such as lyric essays, fiction, memoir and poetry. We’ll look at writers such as T Fleischmann, Emily Dickinson and Hervé Guibert, Wayne Koestenbaum, Ocean Vuong, Adrienne Rich, Julietta Singh and more.

Example topics for activities and writing prompts include fractured identity, unnatural relations, crush-energy and melodrama, and there will also be opportunities to get outside and use our surroundings for inspiration.

All writing activities will be suitable for any level and any genre you’re working in, be it a novel, a sequence of poetry, autobiography, or something that doesn’t sit comfortably within these forms.

The course will be run by declan wiffen, who is lecturer in Contemporary Literature at The University of Kent, where he teaches a third year special module on lyric essays and autofiction, as well as Tutor for Beyond Form Creative Writing, where he has taught two writing courses on queer ecologies, Cruising Nature and FUCK Plants. His pamphlet indiscriminate lanking was published in July 2022 by Invisible Hand Press and the video-zine Endless Chat // #2 [draft] can be found at Permeable Barrier. He was invited to write ‘An Afterword, if you like’ to accompany the publication of Derek Jarman’s only work of short fiction, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping, an excerpt of which was published by Granta. Other recently writing can be found at SPAM Zine, FieldNotes 003 and Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue

The retreat is fully catered (from afternoon tea & supper on Monday till breakfast on Saturday – and lots of cake in between) with a vegetarian menu (although other dietary needs can be met). The course fee includes all teaching, meals, wine with dinner, and comfortable accommodation.

The retreat costs £750 (one cheaper room, one shared room, & one subsidised place available: please email info@writesouthwestscotland.com for details)