Beginners’ Workshop Group
Join a supportive community for close reading and developmental feedback on your new poems!
* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *
This is a workshop group for new poets who want to write together and share their work in a safe space and receive gentle, constructive feedback from an experienced, published, prize-winning tutor and from their fellow writers. These workshops will focus on free-writing in response to brief single-poem prompts, followed by any poems the group wishes to share, focussed on building community and mutual support. You will need to be interested in sharing your writing, but you do not need to be an experienced writer – this is a group aimed at poets who wish to build their confidence in a friendly and supportive environment, including total beginners who may never have written or shared a poem before. This workshop group is run in partnership with our course, Poetic Forms for Beginners.
This course is currently in a Priority Booking period, meaning it is only available to students continuing from the previous term. We will open any remaining spaces to new students on Monday 18 November. If you would like to be added to the waiting list for this, please email [email protected].
5 fortnightly Zoom sessions on Wednesdays, 7–9pm (BST/GMT), starts 29 Jan 2025. 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. More information about how our Video Courses work can be found on the Video Courses page. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].
Image credit: @didsss
About Becky Varley-Winter 
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Becky Varley-Winter’s first full-length poetry collection, Dangerous Enough, was published by Salt in 2023. She has also published a poetry pamphlet, Heroines: On the Blue Peninsula (V. Press, 2019), was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2019, won the T. R. Henn and Brewer-Hall Prizes, and appeared in Poetry Review, Magma, Rising, Finished Creatures, and Tentacular, amongst others. Her other publications are a book on modernist poetry and literary fragments, Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature (Sussex Academic Press, 2018), and a collection of short fiction, BLOOM (Broken Sleep Books, 2021).
"Writing has become a source of pleasure and satisfaction. The class has been supportive, accepting and welcoming without judgement or intrusion. I've learned a huge amount. Becky is an outstanding teacher; she creates a warm and relaxed environment, combined with well chosen content and inspiring prompts."
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