Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s first National Poet 2005-06 and wrote the six-foot-high words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre. She’s an award-winning poet in both Welsh and English and was awarded an MBE for services to literature and mental health, which she has written about extensively. Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression appeared in 2002 (HarperCollins); Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling, about maternal emotional abuse was published in 2024 (University of Wales Press), First Rain in Paradise (Bloodaxe Books, 2025) is her most recent poetry collection. Gwyneth teaches at the US’s Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English and has been Artist in Residence at Balliol College, Oxford for the last three years.
Poetry and Well-being
Writing is not therapy – but it can be therapeutic. This course will show you how to approach writing in a way which supports your well-being – offering connection, understanding, expression, exploration, and enjoyment, whilst negotiating the hazards of the demands of form and the exposure involved in this semi-public act of communication.
Using a combination of reading and writing exercises, alongside connection with the landscape and with each other, we’ll consider how to say what we really mean when we’re exploring complex issues and writing towards and away from pain. We’ll consider safeguarding in writing; how to negotiate the hazards of fear and discomfort; how to protect ourselves against exhaustion, judgement and self-criticism.
Tutors Clare Shaw and Gwyneth Lewis will use their experience of writing about love, failure, pain and endurance to guide you. Gwyneth will be happy to read work submitted in Welsh.
Tutors
Gwyneth Lewis
Clare Shaw
Clare Shaw (they/them) has four poetry collections with Bloodaxe. Their fourth collection - Towards a General Theory of Love (2022) - is an exploration of love and its absence: it won a Northern Writer’s Award and was a Poetry Society Book of the Year. With a background in mental health and education, Clare is a keen advocate for writing as a means of social and personal change. Clare is a tutor, mentor and lecturer for organisations including the University of Huddersfield, Wordsworth Grasmere, the Royal Literary Fund and New Writing North. In their writing, teaching and activism, their work often engages with the intersections of ecology, trauma, resilience and social justice.
Guest Reader
Abeer Ameer (Digital)
Abeer Ameer’s poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies including Acumen, Poetry Wales, Planet, Atrium, Magma, The Rialto, New Welsh Review, The Poetry Review and Long Poem Magazine. She is a recipient of the Literature Wales Mentoring Scheme for 2020.Her debut poetry collection, Inhale/Exile, in which she shares stories from her Iraqi heritage, was published by Seren Books in February 2021. Inhale/Exile was selected to the Wales Literature Exchange Bookcase for 2021 and was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year in 2022.