On Saturday I had a great time leading an on-line nature-writing workshop as part of the London Wildlife Trust’s Festival of the Great North Wood.

About thirty-five participants logged in to flex their creative writing muscles and try out nature writing. We focused on ultra-short-form nature-writing – which I’ve dubbed Thumbnail Nature – and finding our own unique perspective to bring to writing about trees. I shared some beautiful examples of Thumbnail Nature written by Dara McAnulty, Nicola Chester and Dominic Couzens.

The outputs of this workshop – their quality, creativity and diversity – were extraordinary. It feels like there’s a rich seam of untapped nature-writing talent out there in south London and beyond. I’m busy curating the Thumbnail pieces ready for publication.

It was fantastic reading the participants feedback too and I’m encouraged to plan future workshop ideas which I will promote on this blog.

This is what they said:

“Thank you so much for your insightful workshop. That was absolutely amazing!”

“Please let me know if you run any other workshops, I’d be very interested.”

“Thank you for a brilliant workshop. It was truly a blessing to still my mind and think of nature.”

“I attended your workshop on nature writing yesterday, and I want to say thank you for all your tips and activities- they gave me a lot to think about and were a lot of fun!” 

“This was my first writing workshop and it was structured perfectly for me to follow along, understand how to break up the process of developing a “thumbnail” writing example. I really enjoyed it.”