Good Grief Studio: Navigating Trauma in Poetry & Song

Write through loss, in all its forms, to find what you've gained on the other side of grief.

In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes claims that grief – like sex and parenthood – separates those who have experienced it from those who have not. Complicated grief, whether related to a change of environment, a bereavement, the end of a relationship, or traumatic event that is hard to process, can leave a person in a position in which, although the world keeps turning, they are trapped at the point of their trauma, endlessly replaying events to no positive end. How to break the spiral?

With reference to the work of Nick Cave, Bruce Springsteen, David Berman, Jack Gilbert, Mimi Khalvati, Max Porter, Alice Hiller, David Tait, Harry Man and Endre Ruset, Paul Stephenson, Carrie Etter, Annie Fisher, Ted Hughes, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Charles Schultz, Tove Jansson, Blade Runner, and Twin Peaks, we will look at different approaches taken by poets and songwriters to regain agency – including thinking mythologically, taking our own slant, seeking out the missing directly and creating our own narrative arcs.

We will write list poems (with a twist), epistolary poems, and create ‘live photos’, as well as experimenting with altering syntax, tense, and vantage to approach our grief from different angles – and push language’s ability to shape and contain reality to its limits. We will see how harnessing our personal stories to those that have come before allows us to place our experience in the larger human context, no matter how devastating. We will look at what is left behind in the absence of a loved one – or a present or future we had thought secure – as well as what we are able to do with it. We will consider the demands of public-facing and private-facing grief and how, in the words of songwriter Julie Byrne, ‘Grief is more than sorrow, it’s collaboration.’

Can the act of writing replace a spiral with a narrative arc? Can writing about grief provide an agency lacking in life? Can, as Nick Cave claims, grief result in you becoming a more total human being?

Studios are 4-week intensive courses. Reading material will be distributed before the course begins. There are no live chats so they are suitable for both UK & International students.

Concessions & Accessibility

To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].

What to Expect

Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, please visit our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.

Image credit: @Alex Simpson

About Matt Bryden View Profile

Matt Bryden is a writer and teacher living in Devon. His most recent publication The Glassblower’s House (Live Canon, 2023) is an exploration of fatherhood against a background of personal catastrophe and was a Broken Sleep Book of the Year. Matt’s poetry is widely published and has won the William Soutar prize, the Charroux Memoir prize, and a Literature Matters award from the Royal Society of Literature. He is Royal Literary Fellow at the University of Exeter and co-host of Exeter’s Uncut Poets series. www.mattbrydenpoetry.co.uk

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