This creative writing workshop is especially centred on writing perspectives around black history and black lives – whether these are personal or part of collective experiences. The aim is to inspire you to feel confident about writing on subjects that matter to you in a way that celebrates your personal history and experiences. You will benefit from engaging peer discussions, feedback and tutoring to help improve your writing and sharing your ideas in a comforting safe space.

If you are silent about your pain they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”Zora Neal Hurston

Imagine that!

You have your story, your pain, your joys too, your love, your rage, your everything – bubbling around your heart and soul, crippling your sense of self and identity, reducing your full potential to a rubble of deliberately deferred dreams. It’s not so much about the silence or being silenced. It is about identifying your voice so that you can tell your story.

The basis for this Writing Workshop is simple: it will help you write (and speak) with confidence in a way that represents who you are. Our aim is to help you to ‘strive to find your own voice,’ as Robin Williams advises, ‘because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all.’

Small group interaction and exercises enable participants to free their imagination and develop a voice through which they can express their own style and rhythm in writing. This is a unique opportunity that also encourages personal development through exploring questions of self and cultural identity. The workshop is open to anyone who enjoys writing or desires to write; whether a beginner or experienced with an emphasis on Black experience, history and culture.

Workshop facilitator: Dr Michelle Asantewa

Dr Asantewa is a writer, publisher, and facilitates writing workshops as an Independent Scholar. She set up Way Wive Wordz Publishing, Editing and Tuition Services, an education platform to accommodate a range of academic, cultural and creative aspirations. Her first novel Elijah and poetry collection The Awakening and Other Poems were self-published in 2014. Guyanese Komfa: The Ritual Art of Trance – her PhD thesis, Something Buried in the Yard and Mama Lou Tales: A Folkloric biography of a Guyanese Elder, were published in 2016. She is currently co-course leader of The Amazing James Baldwin Course, African Women Resistance Leaders: Spiritual and Political course, Toni Morrison and Andrea Levy courses. Her most recent publication is In Search of Mami Wata: Narratives and Images of African Water Spirits (2020).