FUSIONS: a Word Factory Masterclass with Gaia Holmes

The Word Factory Presents:

Fusions is a series of exclusive online masterclasses featuring short story writers who also write in other forms.

1: The Mermaid In The Bathtub with Gaia Holmes

“The carnivalesque stories [in ‘He Used To Do Dangerous Things’, by Gaia Holmes] stage vengeful fantasies, in which the dispossessed and victimised overturn repressive hierarchies through magical powers.

In some of the stories, though, this happens not so much through the intervention of the supernatural, but through a kind of mundane, everyday magic, where the utopian and the real overlap, if only momentarily.”- Jonathan Taylor in ‘Morning Star’, November 2024

In the first of our new Fusions series of masterclasses, award winning poet and short story writer, Gaia Holmes, will discuss the ideas and inspirations behind ‘He Used To Do Dangerous Things’, her debut collection of short fiction (Comma Press, 2024). She will talk about how it felt to live next door to a sea monster for six months, share tips and texts from some of her favourite authors and offer up some practical and inspirational writing prompts to help you to generate your own original works of fiction.

Please note: our classes are small, intimate and friendly.

About Gaia Holmes:

Gaia Holmes, was born in Halifax. Though she has left the town several times she has always been drawn back to the place by the soft, green hooks of its hills and valleys.

She has been a gallery attendant, a cleaner, a lecturer, a lollypop lady and a busker and has lived in churches, caves, deserted beach houses, tall terraces and caravans. Now she is a creative writing tutor and pet/house sitter and lives in Halifax in a tiny flat above the tree line on the top floor of a ramshackle Georgian mansion that Dorothy and William Wordsworth used to visit.

Gaia Holmes is the author of three poetry collections, Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed, Lifting The Piano With One Hand and Where The Road Runs out (Comma Press).

In February 2023, Gaia received a prestigious award from Arts Foundation Futures for ‘writing about place’. The award enabled her to spend much of the year working on her debut collection of short stories called ‘He Used To Do Dangerous Things’, which was published in October 2024.

“The stories in the collection are very ‘place oriented’” She says. “They explore themes of loneliness, compassion, small acts of human kindness, power cuts, magpies, kitchen sink magic and frozen turkeys!”

Your Host: Cathy Galvin

Poet, editor and journalist Cathy Galvin is founder of the Word Factory and the Sunday Times Short Story Award. Her stories have appeared in a variety of anthologies, most recently The Book of Coventry (Comma Press). She is the editor of Red, the Waterstones Anthology of New Writing and The Guillemot Factory. Her journalism has appeared in national newspapers and magazines including the Sunday Times, Financial Times and The Tablet. Her poetry includes the sequences Walking the Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva (Guillemot Press), Rough Translation and Black and Blue (The Melos Press). Her debut collection, Ethnology, is due from Bloodaxe Books in February 2026.

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If you have any difficulties contact Word Factory director Cathy Galvin at cathy@thewordfactory.tv

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Refunds up to 7 days before event

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Painting above: Richard Sharland