Writing What Can’t Be Said - Online Prose Writing Series

Join writer Mark Bowles (All My Precious Madness) for a series of four creative writing workshops that explore writing as a means of touching what language can barely contain — trauma, rage, madness, silence — and finding form, vitality, or even grace within that tension.

Across the four sessions, we’ll explore how writing can hold or accommodate that which is “too much.”

Through talk, reading, laughter, silence and cunning, these workshops invite you to approach your own truth; not to explain or fix it, but to give it rhythm, shape, and voice.

Above all, we will seek to honour the emotional and existential intensity that fuels art.

Sessions can either be taken as a course or as individual sessions, as you choose.

Level: Suitable for novices and experienced writers alike, the only criteria is that you bring along something of your body and soul.

The sessions are as follows:

Session One: Writing and Trauma, 21 January

There are things we carry in our bodies because the language we have can’t hold them. In this one-hour workshop on Writing and Trauma, writer Mark Bowles (All My Precious Madness) invites you into a space where we don’t need to explain everything — only to approach through language what pulses underneath it or shatters it. We’ll look at how trauma fractures story, and how writing doesn’t necessarily “fix” it, but might at least give it rhythm, shape, or at least create a vent through which it escapes.

There’ll be some talk, some silence, a writing prompt that might open a window, and a chance (only if you want) to read what came through. This isn’t therapy. It’s just us, and a page, and maybe something true.

Session Two: Writing From Rage, 25 February

"There is nothing but the most deadly hatred and rage in everything I write. Rage is the engine. Rage against stupidity, against death, against institutions, against compromise.” –Thomas Bernhard, interview in Der Spiegel

Rage is a source, not simply a symptom.

This workshop invites writers to stop apologising for their rage and start using it – precisely, relentlessly, beautifully. We will trace the anatomy of rage as it appears in literature – not tantrums, fits of pique, but as a structural and structuring force.

From Thomas Bernhard’s venomous spirals to Audre Lorde’s lucid fire, from Baldwin’s incandescent justice to Acker’s punk obliterations – rage has always been an agent of truth-telling. Participants will explore how to write from their own fury – without ranting, without retreating.

Through guided exercises, close readings, and blunt talk, we’ll learn to shape rage into a language that bites, resists, survives. This is not a therapy session. This is not about catharsis. This is about control. Precision. Power. The blood on the page should still spell something. Come with your teeth bared, or come trembling. Either way: come willing to write what you’d rather burn.

Session Three: Writing and Madness: Celebrating the Legitimately Unruly, 18 March

“Madness” has always been something that writers have invited or flirted with. Baudelaire spoke of “the prodigious energy of delirium.” Deleuze called madness “the point where thought breaks its leash.”

This workshop invites you to stop apologising for your own strangeness and start writing from it—directly, dangerously, precisely. Together, we will read, discuss, and practice forms that give madness shape without muting its voltage.

We will consider “madness” not as the absence of reason but as an excess of vitality. We will look at writers from the past who have invoked “madness” as something which creatively disrupts the world as it is and allows their voice to blossom.

The goal: to write with our symptoms, tics, repetitions, and refusals — not against them.

Come trembling or luminous.
Come with your fractures and your fever.

Session Four: Awkward, Pregnant, Stunned, Dead: Silence and Writing, 22 April

Often, it is the unsaid that bites hardest. What waits in the pauses. What crouches in the margins.

But how to bring silence into words? How to frame it?

This one-hour workshop explores the relationship between writing and silence — how moments of stillness can open up language rather than close it down..

We’ll consider what happens in the pauses between thoughts, and how quietness can deepen observation, sharpen tone, and reveal what writing often tries to cover. The session invites writers to slow down, listen closely, and discover how the absence of words might become an eloquent instrument.

We will then host an open mic night so we can read and celebrate the work we have created. This will be scheduled later on.

Mark Bowles grew up between Bradford and Leeds, and went on to study English at Liverpool and Oxford Universities. He currently lives in Brockley with his wife and 2 small children. Mark's first novel, All My Precious Madness, was published by Galley Beggar Press in September 2024.

NB the time is Central European Time and so this is 6-8pm UK time.