This workshop has been cancelled. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused. If you had a ticket for this workshop the box office will be in touch to issue a refund.

Have you ever tried to pin down the places you’ve travelled through with words? Do you yearn to link your story to the ground under your feet? This writing workshop will be looking at how writers place themselves in their physical surroundings and how this embodies itself in their work.

Participants will be invited to write, walk and workshop their words as we examine what lies beneath the surface of the places we move through. Award-winning author Joanna Pocock will be bringing her years of teaching experience to motivate writers from all walks of life to put pen to paper.

About the Author

Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has appeared in Dazed & Confused, Distinctly Montana, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, Orion Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, and on the Dark Mountain blog, among other publications.

She was shortlisted for the Barry Lopez Narrative Nonfiction Prize in 2017, and won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender, a hybrid work of memoir, reportage, nature writing and criticism. She has taught Creative Writing at a variety of universities across the UK and currently runs a beginners fiction class and a narrative non-fiction course at the University of the Arts, London.

SURRENDER

Blending personal memoir with reportage, Surrender is a narrative nonfiction work on the changing landscape of the West and the scavenger, rewilder, and ecosexual communities, inspired by a two-year stay in Montana. In the style of Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard, Joanna Pocock, the winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, explores the changing landscape of the West in an era of increasing climatic disruption, rising sea levels, animal extinctions, melting glaciers, and catastrophic wild fires.

Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her essays, reviews, and travel pieces have appeared in Distinctly Montana, Litro, Sunday Independent, Los Angeles Times, the Nation, Orion, Tahoma Literary Review, 3:AM and on the Dark Mountain blog. She was shortlisted for the Barry Lopez Narrative Nonfiction Prize in 2017, and won 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender. She teaches creative writing at the University of the Arts in London and works as a freelance editor for a variety of publishers.

“Surrender is an astonishing book about nature, fertility, grief, the American West, the consolations of travel and the exquisite agonies of mortal life. Beautiful, wise and deeply moving, this is ambulatory philosophy at its finest.”
— Joanna Kavenna, author of A Field Guide to Reality

“Written with great narrative richness and an anthropologist’s intrepid gaze, Surrender is fascinating, urgent and profoundly compelling. It is an important addition to nature’s library.”
— Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters