The Mourning Pages - 2025

Schedule

Key dates

27th October, 7pm-9pm GMT. Online via Zoom: we will welcome you to the project and get the ball rolling, begin to think about and engage with the ideas of rest as productivity, how creative grief might be nourishing and orient yourself and your specific needs for this experience.

10th November, 7pm-9pm GMT. A mid-way check-in. This free-wheeling sessions will be a bit of a check-in with you to discuss any positive progress and help unknot any tricky things that have come up. You'll receive bespoke guidance from Tina and Ciarán, as well as from other participants. From our previous experience, the learning and progress that can be made from the group check-in is really powerful, as well as being a beautiful opportunity to feel less alone in your journey and learn from others.

Throughout November. If you need more support with rest and recuperation, want some specific guidance on any aspect of creativity or perhaps even want to discuss a possible new project you can book an optional 1-2-1 with either Tina or Ciarán at an additional cost of £50. Dates will be made available after the first meeting and we'll work with you to find the best dates available.

24th November, 7pm-9pm GMT. Online via Zoom: We'll gather for a final meeting to discuss our experiences, share what we learned, offer our thoughts on where we might go next on our journeys of rest and restoration.

Resources and Practices. In between our live online gatherings, you will receive accessible and practical resources, essays, practices and suggestions to help aid rest, nourishment and recovery from burn-out. We send these out rather than deliver live so you can manage them in your own time and at your own pace.

The Mourning Pages is a new kind of creative programme, designed to help you recover and rejuvenate after completing a big creative project, or when you feel creatively ‘spent’ and 'burned-out'.

Many creative writing workshops and programmes focus on getting started or keeping up momentum, but few workshops look at what can help you transition from the end of one big project to the beginning of another one, or if you're feeling stuck and 'in-between'.

This liminal space can often be uncomfortable, plagued with a sense of emptiness, ‘spentness’, fatigue and a fear that you will never produce creatively again. Tina Sederholm and Ciarán Hodgers have both experienced this “creative-grief” after publishing poetry collections and touring shows. Through a shared experience and heartfelt conversation, they came to understand that if they traversed this period thoughtfully and restfully, it could in fact become a time of nourishment, inspiration and grounding.

Modern society today holds productivity on such a high pedestal that often the idea of rest or restoration feels unproductive, and through the messaging we are bombarded with constantly, invaluable; unworthy, unwanted and perhaps even a moral failing on our part. While productivity and discipline are important creative tools, we want to explore rest as productive, of creative-grief as nourishment, of the inspiring quiet as a powerful antidote to the production line, burn-out, too-many-spinning-plates, frazzled minds we have begun too accustomed to.

Taking place from late October to late November, we will be aligning ourselves with the seasonality of the world around us during the time of Samhain and Hallowe’en in preparation for the deep rest that we may wish to receive the Winter Solstice / Holiday season.

So if you’ve just finished a creative project and want to embrace more fully this part of the creative cycle join us for an interactive and participant-led approach in this exciting pilot project from two award-winning writers.

Tina Sederholm is a poet who takes the written word and brings it alive on stage. Her poetry is funny, engaging and deceptively profound. She brings a light touch to awkward situations, and contends that no person or day is exempt from an interesting story. Over the last twenty years she has created five solo spoken word theatre shows, including the sellout show, Everything Wrong With You Is Beautiful. A veteran of seven runs at The Edinburgh Fringe, she has also performed at festivals such as TheatreFest, Off Beat Oxford, Swindon Fringe, Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Wantage Betjeman Festival and the Burton Taylor Studio.

Tina is author of poetry collections, The Velvet Box, Everything Wrong With You Is Beautiful and This Is Not Therapy, as well as three books on equestrianism. She loves helping other writers hone their work too, through one to one mentoring and editing workshops. When she isn’t writing and performing, Tina can be found walking her dogs across the rolling North Oxfordshire countryside. You can read her latest work on Substack at This Is Not Therapy.

Ciarán Hodgers (he/him/his) is an Irish spoken word poet based in the UK. His debut poetry collection Cosmocartography, published by Burning Eye Books in 2018, was shortlisted for the prestigious Rubery Book Award and toured the UK & Ireland, featuring in national media on both sides of the pond. His latest collection, Solastalgia, was published by Burning Eye in November 2023. Winner of the Sean Dunne National Young Writer Award in 2010, an International Pangaea Poetry Slam Champion 2015 and the Word War 3 Slam Champion, he has been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, OutSpoken Prize for Poetry and longlisted for the Not The Foreword and Gingko Eco-poetry competition. Published internationally in journals, anthologies, festivals, exhibitions and curriculum texts, he is also an experienced workshop leader and creative mentor, supporting people with their creative practice towards publication and a sustainable, consistent creativity.