‘when the lights of health go down’: On Being Ill Studio

Tackle the universal experiences of illness, frailty and vulnerability in your poetry.

‘There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional) a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.’ – Virginia Woolf

When we number the ‘great preoccupations’ of literature we might count the usual suspects of love, death, war, freedom, isolation, nature, and adventure. But as Virginia Woolf pointed out in her essay ‘On Being Ill’, it’s curious that sickness – in some ways, a universal experience – doesn’t often rank amongst them.

In the long tail of a historic global sickness, now might be a time to take a look at the poetics of the sick and the sickening, and ask what they can tell us about our relationships to our bodies, to each other, to the promises of modernity, to other great obsessions of literature like romance, duty and disaster. What forms of life are deemed worthy? How do we narrativise the stories of bodily frailty or ‘failure’, how do we talk about vulnerability and mutual dependency?

From the wounded fisher king of Arthurian legend to the romance of consumptive artists in La Boheme to the zoonotic apocalypses of modern zombie movies, from the AIDS crisis to public health measures of Victorian cities to pandemic-era medical conspiracy theories, we look at how illness and disease are written about, and how our poetry can interrogate and reframe those themes. We’ll approach poetry new and old through a critical d/Disability studies lens. Via Anne Carson, Kaveh Akbar, sam sax, Sarah Shulman, Essex Hemphill, Richard III, Frankenstein, Derek Jarman, Jodi Picoult, La Boheme, Disney renaissance villains, John Waters, Raj Patel.

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 concessionary 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, wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, or require any form of adjustment to access our courses, please email [email protected]. For more information visit our Online Courses page.

Image credit: @anntarazevich

About Eleanor Penny View Profile

Eleanor Penny is a writer & broadcaster. She has won numerous awards for her poetry and fiction, including the London Poetry Prize, the Verve Poetry Festival Prize, a T.S. Eliot Emerging Writers’ Fellowship, and a London Writers Award for Literary Fiction. She is an alumnus of the Barbican Young Poets Programme, and twice shortlisted for Young People’s Poet Laureate for London. Her pamphlet Mercy was published by Flipped Eye in 2021. She is a creative writing tutor at City Lit Academy. Residencies include Prospect Cottage, the Centre 4 Recent Drawing, and St Paul’s Cathedral. She runs the live literature project Bedtime Stories for the End of the World. Her non-fiction and journalism work has appeared in publications including the New Statesman, the London Review of Books, The Independent, and Vice Magazine. She hosts the Verso Books podcast and Novara FM.

"Being able to study high quality courses from a distance and with flexibility is invaluable to older poets, poets in full time work, poets with accessibility needs, poets who may feel excluded from the main poetry circuits."

– Spring 2024 survey response

The Poetry School