Writing Place: Memory and Community at the Edge of Land and Sea

We're inviting you to something a little different in May! This fun, stimulating, virtual workshop forms part of the small step-by-step Meeting Selsey project which you can read more about here and here.  It's a creative writing workshop of sorts, but transcends that notion in so many ways.   It's suited to complete beginners, as well as those used to writing (perhaps in your journal), as well as those who are simply curious and want to take advantage of trying something completely different.

Background

Craig, who is leading this project about people, belonging and community, has approached a wonderful woman called Chelsea Scudder - author and contributor to the incredible ecology and culture magazine, Emergence to ask if she would consider facilitating an online writing workshop on exploring our sense of place, memory and community.  The purpose of this is to (a) do something a little different in terms of connecting with each other and (b) use some of this material to help form part of the Meeting Selsey project, which is a slowly-evolving work in progress.

About the workshop

This creative writing workshop invites us to explore how our own memories and experiences mediate our relationship to lands and waters; as well as how the memories and histories of the lands and waters we inhabit imprint themselves onto us. Together, we'll consider the stories that arise from the shifting edge of the shoreline and how we might tell those stories, as individuals and as members of a community.

About the facilitator Chelsea Scudder

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is the author of Rebirth: Mothering Through Ecological Collapse (Broadleaf Books, 2024). She grew up in the Great Plains of Nebraska and Oklahoma. After receiving her masters of theological studies at Harvard Divinity School, her writing became focused on the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred and sublime. From 2017-2022, she worked as a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine, an online and print publication exploring the intersection of culture, ecology and spirituality.  Her work has also been featured in The Common, The Slowdown, Crannóg Magazine, Inhabiting the Anthropocene, EcoTheo Review, and the edited poetry collection Writing the Land.

She lives with her family in Portland, Maine.  See https://www.chelseasteinauerscudder.com/

In order to cover a fraction of Chelsea's costs, we are asking for a nominal contribution of £10 per person which will go directly to Chelsea for her time. If you RSVP, Justine will be in touch to organise this directly with you.

Please RSVP as soon as you can, so we have an idea of numbers. It will be something different to experience, fun and hugely enjoyable, so please do come along.