Move Slowly and Mend Things

Set down your phone and come and join one of today’s greatest writers and one of our most imaginative sound artists and knitting crafters to explore your creativity. We will be feeding our care for all that makes us fully human and present. We will work and play with noticing, writing, crafting, talk, and silence, giving you a day of nourishment and reflection, and the new or revived beginnings of a practice of work, art and presence.

Slowness can be uncomfortable, inconvenient, and frustratingly imposed upon us by circumstances and responsibilities. It can also bring us back to ourselves and teach us how to live. Our workshops unravel the nets that trap us in counting and quantifying our worth, obsessing about productivity and fretting about scarcity. We create the space for learning together how to unpick the stories that stitch us up. We free ourselves to mend our creativity, curiosity, and kindness. We rediscover our meaningful work, and foster what no machine or algorithm can replicate: trust, embodiment, fellowship, creative risk-taking, joyful failure, and a playful sense of abundance against all odds.

Sarah Moss is a novelist, memoirist, teacher and journalist. She has written nine novels, two memoirs and a range of essays, newspaper columns and scholarly writing. She has taught English Literature and Creative Writing at universities in Britain, Ireland and Europe, including being Director of the Warwick Writing Programme and running the MA and MFA programmes in Creative Writing at University College Dublin. She enjoys running, yoga, knitting and cooking and, after living in many cities and several countries, is now settled in Dublin and County Clare. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Felix Ford is a neurodivergent disabled artist working with knitting, sound and creative journaling to foreground the preciousness of our real, everyday lives. From recording domestic sounds for her PhD, to publishing books and online courses that show you how to turn your life into stranded colourwork knitting; from mending the patches in her clothes, to running her wildly popular online journaling course; everything Felix does celebrates the magic of ordinary life and insists that we care more about small things. Play lies at the heart of her practice.

Harriet Harris, hosting this event, is currently lead University Chaplain to the University of Edinburgh, where she has created the Abundant Academy programme to challenge the grind-culture of academia. She is a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church, a Licensed Time-To-Think Facilitator, a trauma-informed embodiment coach, and a leadership Coach and Trainer with One of Many® the fastest-growing network of women leaders in the UK. A former university lecturer, she has been awarded an MBE and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for her innovative work in universities.