About the course

The imagination is a never-ending playground. We can build castles in the wilderness, invent words like greedilicious, dream in ink, and make paper sing. This isn’t a school from school.

Over eight sessions, we’ll create a safe space to explore the rule-breaking, risk-taking universe inside our heads and be the hero (or villain) of our own stories and poems. We can change the way other people see us and the way we see ourselves because imagination takes us everywhere.

Who is it for?

This course is for underrepresented writers aged 18-25–those who face barriers to opportunities due to mental health issues, physical health/disability, sensory impairment, learning disabilities, neurodivergence, substance misuse, survivors, LGBTQIA+ and working class backgrounds. People from global majority backgrounds are particularly welcomed.

Travel costs of up to £2/session are available to ensure access. Please contact us if you’d like more information, or simply bring your ticket/receipt to the session to be reimbursed.

Dates

Saturdays 7, 14, 21, 29 May & 4, 11, 18, 25 June 2022

Times

1 – 3 pm

Cost

Free

About the course leaders

IMPART has been generously supported by the Baring Foundation to provide a year-long training and development programme under its Creatively Minded and Ethnically Diverse strand.

Emerging writers are being mentored by more experienced ones in how to run creative writing workshops. In this instance, Susan is being mentored by Yvonne and they, in turn, are both co-leading the course.

About Susan Downer

Born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents, Susan Hunter Downer moved to Nottingham to study, to London to work, and to Sheffield to live. She writes scripts, short stories, blogs, and poetry, and is a member of the editorial board of Short Fiction Journal. She won the Creative Future Platinum Prose Award in 2019, and she will serve as a shortlist judge for the 2022 Awards. She is currently working on her first novel, and her poetry will be included in an anthology in 2022. When she’s not working, she enjoys walking, talking, and eating things that neither walk nor talk.

About Yvonne Battle-Felton

Author of Remembered (Dialogue Books/Blackstone Publishing), Yvonne Battle-Felton is an American author living and writing in the UK. Remembered was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize. Yvonne writes contemporary fiction, historical fiction, personal essays, and adventure and creative nonfiction for children. You can read her writing for children in the Penguin Ladybird series. Yvonne currently lectures in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University where she is Business and Enterprise Lead. One of Yvonne’s most recent projects is Write Your Novel with Yvonne Battle-Felton, a write along podcast

If the course is full, you can sign up for the waiting list by emailing us here.

These workshops are supported by