Writing and Trauma: Brussels Workshop, September 2025

A budding writer wants to learn the "tools of the trade", basic truths about plotting, characterisation, showing rather than telling, the interlacing of themes and so on. But typically people want to write, need to write, because something in them craves expression, often something that seems "too much", something that isn't simply linguistic but that requires language to breathe, to know itself, to evolve.

One of my obsessions and motifs as a writer is how writing can draw on, use, extend and transform certain "extreme" or intensive experiences. And after all, isn't that what we come to writing for, to feel and think more intensely, to allow ourselves to travel and be transformed.