CÚIRT X FABER ACADEMY WORKSHOPS 2025

In this workshop, we’ll delve (or drag our feet) into the quagmire of family: the unit, the brood, the clan. We’ll interrogate the notion of background, lineage, parentage, birth, marriage; all the people that populate our houses and hearts. There’ll be space to discuss the sticky issues of writing those close to us; how writing our version/experience of our relationships might come into collision with concerns of integrity. We’ll explore the notion of family in memory, persona and dreamscape, using poets like Sharon Olds, Warsan Shire and others as our guides.

Join award-winning poet and editor Kayo Chingonyi in an exploration of the possibilities of mixing text and image to form cartographical writing drawn from the particular sensory resonances of a place. In the first half of the workshop we’ll look at several examples of place writing and discuss. In the second half, we’ll briefly explore our immediate surroundings to make images and capture notes before working on writing drawn from these explorations. Participants should dress for the weather and bring a device capable of making images (a phone will do but sketch pads and instant cameras are also welcome). If you have particular access needs, please be in touch so that the session can be adapted accordingly.

Producing striking images and carefully-honed sentences is one thing, but finding a way to move from the notebook to the printed page can seem a whole other ballgame. The journey can seem daunting, but there are established routes – as well as elements of craft, editing and motivation – to help us get there. This three-hour workshop will focus on these aspects of the journey from writing for ourselves to finding readers and becoming poets out in the world.

Might the poet be, in the words of Lucie Brock-Broido, ‘a freak of letters crossing down a rare / Path bleak with poplars’? Join Richard Scott for this workshop in which we’ll consider our poetic ancestors and how they might haunt and inspire — through intertextuality, idea and form — our writing now. We’ll be doing writing exercises and discussing poems by Will Harris, Allen Ginsberg and Sandeep Parmar, amongst others, as we attempt to talk to the dead and summon the ‘familiar compound ghost’ written about by Seamus Heaney when talking about his many poetic loves including T.S. Eliot.

Join novelist and poet Susannah Dickey for a session on the power of dialogue in fiction. With samples taken from a broad span of global contemporary fiction, in this workshop you will study ways of providing exposition through dialogue in nuanced and subtle ways; learn how to make your characters distinctive through their speaking styles; and study how humour in dialogue can supplement and strengthen tragic or serious topics.

In this workshop, we will examine the short story from three angles: starting out, the gooey middle and the editing. Through discussion, close readings and in-class exercises, we will figure out what makes a story tick, reframe how we view a story’s intention, and learn how we can tighten our own work.

Join Eimear McBride – prize-winning author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, The Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel and The City Changes Its Face – in conversation with Joey Connolly, Director of Faber Academy. Beginning with a conversation about Eimear’s insights on questions of craft, style and technique in fiction, the event will also include a chance to pose your questions about writing to one of the pre-eminent stylists and storytellers of our time.

Do you have an idea – or ideas! – for a novel that you’ve been sitting on for weeks, months, years but just can’t seem to get started? Before we can become writers, we must learn how to become storytellers. In this motivational workshop we’ll be looking at how to unlock those ideas and shape them into a story. Focussing step by step on core story elements that will enable you to answer the all-important questions: What’s my story? And why am I telling it? Once you’ve identified your story, we’ll be working in small groups using examples from recently published fiction, to discuss and plan your novel’s opening scene. The session will conclude with some guided writing that will enable you to begin your novel while in workshop.

In this practice-based workshop, we’ll dive into the practicalities of non-fiction writing projects. Whether you’re working on personal essays, journalism or narrative non-fiction, writing about real people and true stories is complicated. Join us as we workshop pitches, brainstorm how to approach living subjects, and discuss best practices for document-based research and source building.

Whether you’re just starting out or already midway through a project, this workshop should help you sharpen your focus and hone your sense of responsibility within your non-fiction writing.

In this workshop, we’ll explore different approaches to personal narrative, from memoir and autobiography to creative non-fiction, and how to locate and uncover compelling narratives from memory. With in-class readings and exercises, this workshop is ideal for writers new to the memoir form, or for those who’ve always wanted to write their story but are searching for a way in.

In this online taster workshop you’ll be getting to grips with some of the core elements needed to write original and compelling creative nonfiction. Through a combination of group discussion and short writing tasks, you’ll look at what it means to take a creative approach to writing about real-world subjects, and learn some of the skills and techniques that others have brought to this exciting and diverse genre.

Exercises will be open and exploratory – you’ll experiment with voice and form, playing with contrast and scale to bring an original perspective to the subjects that interest you. Borrowing a technique from Maggie Nelson, we’ll be writing in concentric circles; we’ll willingly follow tangents as we experiment with research methods, and ask how to write characters that are as real on the page as the stories they inhabit. Working from an essay by Michael Malay, we’ll also consider how personal narratives can function within works of creative nonfiction – how we might write about landscapes even as we hone in on close-up, sensory details.

By the end of the session, you should have gained some new tools to help you approach your material in fresh and novel ways.