At A Loss:
Grief Writing Workshop

with James McDermott

Wednesday 5 February 2025
Zoom, 7 - 9pm
Tickets: £20/£15 (tickets limited)

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In this inclusive and interactive two-hour online workshop, designed for writers of all abilities and all forms and incorporating a series of practical writing exercises and discussions of grief poetry, prose and essays, you will learn tools and techniques that will help you to re-see bereavement, grief and emotional loss.

 

The workshop will help you to explore innovative and inventive approaches to writing that are informed by an awareness and understanding of the grieving process from shock to acceptance and recovery. It will also encourage you to do so while remaining mindful of your own wellbeing, and of your own place in time along the grieving journey.

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The workshop will be led by playwright, screenwriter and poet James McDermott, whose new poetry collection, Father Myself (Nine Arches Press, February 2025), explores grief and growth after losing his father to COVID. TS Eliot Prize winning poet Joelle Taylor has described the collection as ’a meditation on father-son love, queerness, loss, imperfection, and a man slowly becoming his own father. Lyrical, haunting and exquisitely rendered. A bright devastation of a book’.

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About James McDermott
James’ other poetry collections include Wild Life (Nine Arches Press; shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Award 2023) and Manatomy (Burning Eye Books; longlisted for Polari’s First Book Prize 2021). His plays, published by Samuel French, include Jab, Time and Tide and Rubber Ring. He has also written frequently for television, radio and short films. James is an Arvon writing tutor and lecturer in creative writing at The University of East Anglia.

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More about James: