Writing about illness we experience, the care we give, or being disabled by society, can bring its own health and wellbeing benefits. This supportive set of live online workshops is a safe space to begin exploring and, if you feel comfortable, expressing your individual story. Based on gentle prompts to encourage new writing, this is a time to pause and find your unique perspective.
There are so many ways we can write about health, care and illness. Those of us with health and care needs, or those who have been silenced by society, might first need to give ourselves permission to tell our story. In a world where the medical language of diagnoses, prescriptions and prognoses can obscure our stories, and possibly even silence our perspective, these three workshops are an opportunity to look at our story afresh.
What story are we even telling? Many of us have a complex story to tell, so how might we begin to express it, without overwhelming ourselves? How might we use words to describe, on our terms, what health, care and illness mean to us?
Course Outline
A series of one-and-a-half-hour live zoom workshops with tutor of expressive and therapeutic writing, and coach, Andrew Kauffmann, including a combination of reading, discussion and writing exercises.
- Reading material provided outside of the Zoom session
- Resources on telling your story within safe boundaries and the benefits to expressive writing on health and care experiences
- An optional forum to participate in at the end of the third workshop to reflect on the experience of exploring and expressing your health and care story: a supportive forum where you can feel witnessed and, if you wish, you can share something of your story
- Content rooted in the social model of disability, open to all people with health and care needs, and those who provide care
Paced to be a comfortable writing experience, suited to writers of all levels. There will be a short comfort break. There is no expectation to be on camera, if you don’t feel comfortable appearing on camera. Neither will there be any expectations around sharing what you’ve written with other participants. For returning participants, there will be an added focus in this coming series on writing in a range of experimental forms, mixing genres and without constraints or concern for convention on how we might write our story.
Series of Workshops
You can purchase an individual £25 ticket for each live workshop, or a combination £70 ticket which includes all three workshops at a £5 discount. These sessions are designed to work as a series, with a successive series of writing exercises to engage with to help develop your story.
Combination Ticket: Writing Our Health and Care Stories | £70 | All Three Workshops (Listed Below)
Workshop 1: Writing What´s Within | £25 | Wednesday 18th February | 2–3.30pm, UK Time (GMT / UTC+0)
Workshop 2: Health and Illness as Metaphors | £25 | Wednesday 11th March | 2–3.30pm, UK Time (GMT / UTC+0)
Workshop 3: Lay Bare Our Experience | £25 | Wednesday 1st April | 2–4.15pm, UK Time (BST / UTC+1)
Session three includes an optional further half hour of reflective discussion on how your story might be written or told between 3.45pm and 4.15pm.
Learning Online
These events will be recorded for the purpose of sending to ticket holders who can’t make an event, and those who require the recording to meet their access needs. If you purchase this ticket when a session has already taken place, you will be sent the recording. All recordings will be available to watch until the 14th April 2026, two weeks after the final workshop.
These workshops will take place on Zoom, so you will need to have access to the internet at the times given above. We will share Zoom links for each session via email the day before. You can also access the Zoom link via your Ticket Tailor booking.
