The Dreaming Machine – How Imagination Shapes Our Writing

'The brain is a dreaming machine, it secretes reality, so to speak.'

Professor Rodolpho Llinás

Welcome to The Dreaming Machine - How Imagination Shapes Our Writing.

In this friendly and interactive workshop, led by Professor Graham Mort, we will explore how the brain simulates reality through the imagination. Using examples from neuroscience and creative writing, we'll look at how the texture of writing is influenced by consciousness and how readers bridge the spaces we leave for them. We'll explore how time is managed and how the reader processes multiple realities. You'll create new work in relation to writing prompts and a handout with key quotations and writing examples will accompany the workshop for future reference.

This workshop is suitable for writers of any level of experience engaged in writing either poetry or prose fiction. It builds on Graham's earlier workshop on the free indirect style, focusing on how we experience experience and how we write about it, but is also a fully standalone session.

Graham Mort is the prizewinning author of over a dozen collections of poetry and short fiction. He has also written for the BBC, and his flash fictions have appeared in many literary journals. He is a highly experienced workshop leader on face-to-face courses and online. He taught for the Arvon Foundation, The Poetry Business and EWS as well as in many academic contexts. He is emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Lancaster University, a Higher Education Teaching Fellow and an Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape. You can find more about him here.

NB the time is Central European Time and so this is 6-7.30pm GMT.