James McDermott
Grief Writing Workshop

Saturday 06 June 2026, 10.30am – 12.00pm
Colchester Samaritans, Walsingham Road Community Hall, 34 Walsingham Road, Colchester, CO2 7BN

Drawing on his new collection, Father Myself, James McDermott will lead a special writing workshop to help you to re-see bereavement, grief and emotional loss. This inclusive and interactive workshop is designed for writers of all abilities – all welcome.

Tickets: £20 / £15 concessions (students, under 27s and unwaged)
Box Office: Eventbrite.co.uk

Part of our Love & Loss day of events at Colchester Samaritans

Father Myself, James McDermott

In 2022, James McDermott lost his sixty-year-old father to COVID after three weeks in intensive care. In Father Myself, his second collection from Nine Arches Press, McDermott explores his father’s complex illness and death; grief; growth and how as a queer boy then a bereaved son, he had to learn to father himself.

In clear-sighted and often hard-hitting poems, McDermott takes the reader onto the frontline of the pandemic – documenting the experience and trauma of a COVID-bereaved family with an unflinching eye. Both powerful and compassionate, these extraordinary poems have the capacity to go beyond simply a record of events, reaching sensitively for the human details that matter – the beat of a heart and movement of breath, the touch of a hand, the words we use for goodbye.

Praise for Father Myself:

‘Father Myself is a bright devastation of a book, a meditation on father-son love, queerness, loss, imperfection, and a man slowly becoming his own father. Lyrical, haunting and exquisitely rendered.’
– Joelle Taylor

‘This is emotional, gut-punching stuff. McDermott’s best work to date.’
– Luke Wright

Buy a copy of the book from bookshop.org.