Forest School for Writers (a Biosphere Shared Passions Experience)

“The dayseye hugging the earth
in August, ha! Spring is
gone down in purple,
weeds stand high in the corn,
the rainbeaten furrow
is clotted with sorrel
and crabgrass, the
branch is black under
the heavy mass of the leaves”

— William Carlos Williams

Forest School for Writers is a course designed to heighten your awareness – and use of – nature in your writing. We will be writing in the forest and outdoors, getting close to the trees and well-acquainted with the birds. All writing is enhanced by an understanding of our environment, however urban that might be. These tight details of nature enhance setting and pull the reader in with the most subtle of skills.

The taught section of this course will be taking place in the forest, but we have a number of options for truly inclement weather including nearby bird hides and our own sun-lit teaching room. In the event of mildly inclement weather we would go ahead outside, wearing the right clothes. As Billy Connelly says, there’s no such thing as the wrong weather, only the wrong clothes.

We want to leave some of the treats in store on this course as surprises – even though we’re bursting to tell you – but we can reveal that we have Dark Sky Ranger, Elizabeth Tindal, taking us out for a dark sky experience. Elizabeth is immensely knowledgeable. The Dark Sky Experience is not just about astronomy: it is also about the stories of the stars, and how cultures around the world tell stories about the constellations. Elizabeth also knows the best was to cook the best marshmallows over a Leave Not Trace campfire). The writing possibilities around this experience are as endless as the stars themselves.

Our bird walk, straight from the front door across to the Threave osprey  will be led by Antoine Lemaire of Alouette Nature Tours, a UNESCO Biosphere guide who specialises in birds and how to find the give-away traces of hidden creatures in our natural environment. The writing exercises attached to the bird walk will encourage you to use sounds and liminal signals of nature to illustrate setting and manipulate atmosphere.

There will be a visit to Threave Garden where we will look at the impact of ‘taming nature’ in writing and how gardens rather than wild settings influence fiction. We will write through a yoga session held in the loch-side forest at Barwhillanty Estate  using the peace of our setting and the clarity of the yoga flow to catch our characters ‘by surprise’. There is an option to use this as a meditation session if yoga isn’t your bag.

There will also be a session of shrinrin-yoku (forest-bathing), where we listen to the Earth and nature, engaging our senses amongst the trees. All the time, we will be writing – and sharing with one another – the stories we find in the forest.

“Learn the names of everything: birds; cheese; tractors; cars; buildings. A writer is all at once everything – an architect, French cook, farmer – and, at the same time, a writer is none of these things.” Natalie Goldberg

The course is fully catered and runs from Monday afternoon (with cake on arrival, and supper once everyone has arrived) to breakfast on Saturday.

The cost of the course is £750 and places can be secured with a £250 deposit (email us  for more details). There is also a shared room at £595 per person.

All courses are Covid-dependent and, in the case of it being imprudent to run the course, full refunds will be given.

Anstey, Elizabeth, and Antoine, are all certified Leave No Trace practitioners, UNESCO Biosphere guides, and qualified in Outdoor First Aid.