A Year of Going Places: Expressions of Creativity
A Year of Going Places is a year of writing inspired by art, literature and music. Across three seasons, we'll encounter artists and artworks, novels and music that offer unexpected ways into our own writing. We'll engage deeply with the creative work of other writers and artists to open up new stories and take us to places in our own writing we may not otherwise have gone.
Writing will always be the focus: experimenting, following your curiosity, and discovering what happens when you let other art forms lead the way. You can take part in the live sessions or follow the prompts in your own time.
The three seasons are devised so that you can join for one part, or commit to the whole year. Either way, the emphasis is on creativity, on creating work you can return to, and develop a rhythm to sustain you alongside everything else in your writing practice.
*NEW* please scroll down to see more about the Prompts Only Option.
The workshops are open to writers everywhere, all levels, all genres. All you'll need is a willingness to create, explore, and be open to the surprises in your work. Although the workshops are held in English, you're welcome to write and share work in any language.
Part 1, ART (24 January – 4 April 2027, fortnightly)
"You can’t sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it." Faith Ringgold
What happens when we let art lead us somewhere new in our writing? In Part I of A Year of Going Places, we'll encounter six artists from different parts of the world, each with a distinctive way of seeing and making. From Belkis Ayón's mysterious black-and-white prints to Hilma af Klint's fluid forms, from Frédéric Bruly Bouabré's visual archives to Aurèlia Muñoz's intricate structures, María Berrío's layered fragments and Jean-Michel Basquiat's collision of words and images, we'll find fresh inspiration for our own writing. Art will be the starting point, writing will be our terrain!
“Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy, the joy of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?” Salvador Dalí
Week 1: Belkis Ayón, MALBA, Buenos Aires
Ayón's intricate black-and-white prints draw on Afro-Cuban mythology. In our writing, we'll explore our own personal and cultural mythologies, and see look at how a restricted language can generate a rich and singular world.
Week 2: Hilma af Klint, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
Af Klint used colour, shape and fluid forms to explore spirituality, nature and the invisible forces that shape the world. We'll explore ways that writing can give form to things we sense but cannot quite explain.
Week 3: Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Dia Art Foundation, New York.
Bouabré created an extraordinary visual archive of the world around him, combining handwritten text, drawings, symbols and observations of everyday life. We'll explore the possibilities of collecting, recording and transforming small details into a personal system of images and stories.
Week 4: Aurèlia Muñoz, MACBA, Barcelona
Muñoz transformed textile and handmade paper into intricate structures that move between drawing and sculpture. In our own writing, we’ll weave together different elements, such as fiction, memory, and found text, to create a layered and surprising narrative.
Week 5: María Berrío, San José Museum of Art, California
Berrío assembles fragments of coloured paper into richly layered scenes shaped by mythology, memory and migration. We'll make stories out of fragments, and continue our exploration of using disparate pieces to write stories that are unpredictable even to ourselves.
Week 6: Jean-Michel Basquiat, High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Basquiat’s work challenges the boundary between writing and image, inviting us to think about words as visual objects in their own right. We’ll experiment with repetition, interruption and the expressive possibilities of language on the page.
"Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words." Ursula K. Le Guin
- Limited to 15 participants
- Dates and Times: Sundays, 6–8pm CET (click for corresponding times)
- Part 1 Jan 24, Feb 7 and 21, March 7 and 21, April 4. Total: 6 sessions
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Cost Part 1: €230 (see below for parts 2 and 3)
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Part 2, LITERATURE (May – July, fortnightly)
“By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle." Kurt Vonnegut
What makes a place come alive on the page? How do we transform the places we inhabit, remember, imagine, or dream about? In Part 2 of A Year of Going Places, we'll read six short novels: Don DeLillo's Point Omega, Carole Maso's The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Hussein Barghouthi's The Blue Light, Mario Benedetti's The Truce, Jacqueline Woodson's Another Brooklyn, and Samantha Harvey's Orbital.
We'll explore how writers play with time, perspective, memory and place, using these books as springboards for our own writing. Expect a few experiments and some unexpected detours from your regular subject matter.
Week 1: Don DeLillo's Point Omega
What happens when we write in slow motion? We'll explore our relationship to a vast landscape, and experiment with writing that lingers on a moment.
Week 2: Carole Maso's The American Woman in the Chinese Hat
How do we write a place that is both real and imagined, familiar and strange? We'll experiment with fragmented narratives, and look at the ways a place can become entangled in a character's, or our own, inner life.
Week 3: Hussein Barghouthi's The Blue Light
What happens when the boundaries between reality, memory, and dreams begin to dissolve? We'll explore displacement and the experience of being an outsider, and experiment with losing the plot!
Week 4: Mario Benedetti's The Truce
Through diaries, routines, encounters and the small details of everyday life, we'll explore how a place shapes a person's inner world, and the drama of the unexpected interruption.
Week 5: Jacqueline Woodson's Another Brooklyn
How do we write about a place that survives mainly in memory? We'll draw from childhood, friendships, belonging and loss, and experiment with fragments, shifting perspectives and the sensory details that bring a place to life.
Week 6: Samantha Harvey's Orbital
We'll explore scale, distance, and repetition, and experiment with moving between the intimate and the immense. We'll also look at creative ways to use research in our writing practice.
"For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading." Eudora Welty
- Limited to 15 participants
- Dates and Times: Sundays, 6–8pm CET (click for corresponding times)
- Part 2 May 9 and 23, June 6 an 20, July 4 and 18. Total: 6 sessions
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Cost Part 2: €230 (see below for part 3)
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Part 3, MUSIC (September – December, fortnightly)
"I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another." Anaïs Nin
What can music spark in our writing? In Part 3 of A Year of Going Places, we'll explore songs that take us back to places and people, experiment with the rhythms of the body, and look at the ways repetition and echoes can create meaning in writing. We'll turn to music we dislike, asking what our resistance might reveal, before exploring the voice as an instrument and discovering how sound, cadence and tone bring writing to life. No musical knowledge needed, just a willingness to listen, experiment and play.
Week 1: The Soundtrack of a Life
Music takes us back. A song can return us to a particular time, place, person or version of ourselves. We'll explore music as a form of memory, and the ways sound can unlock stories we may have forgotten.
Week 2: The Instrument
We'll explore rhythm, gesture and the physicality of making music, including the everyday music of tapping, clapping, drumming and whistling. We’ll experiment with the sound-making body and what writing can learn from it.
Week 3: On Repeat
A song on a loop, a recurring melody. Music uses repetition to create rhythm, expectation, pleasure and sometimes irritation. We'll explore writing as composing, and look at the impact of repeating words, phrases, images or scenes in a narrative.
Week 4: I Can't Listen to That
We all have music we avoid, music that irritates or baffles us. We'll explore our reactions to music we dislike and see what those responses might reveal about writing against the grain.
Week 5: The Voice
The voice is an instrument. Singing, speaking, chanting, whispering: each has its own rhythms, textures and expressive possibilities. Through writing, we'll explore the music of a narrative voice, and consider how sound, cadence and tone can shape the voices we create on the page.
Week 6: Listen to This
For our final session, we'll each bring a song we love. We'll listen together and write in response, allowing the music to take our writing wherever it wants to go. A shared listening experience and a celebration of the year's explorations. It’ll be a chance to discover where music might lead our writing next.
Limited to 15 participants
Dates and Times:
- Limited to 15 participants
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Dates and Times: Sundays, 6–8pm CET (click for corresponding times)
- Part 3 Sep 26, Oct 10 and 24, Nov 7 and 21, Dec 5. Total: 6 sessions
- Cost Part 3: €230
"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud." Émile Zola
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Only the Prompts is for anyone who wants to keep writing, follow their curiosity and work independently, without the commitment of live sessions. It follows the same structure as the live course, moving through three seasons of writing inspired by art, literature and music.
Every two weeks, you'll receive a short video introducing the material and a set of writing prompts. You might explore personal mythology in response to an artist's prints, experiment with the ways a novelist slows down time, or discover how a song can unlock a forgotten memory. Each encounter offers a different way into your own writing, thematically and stylistically.
There are no deadlines to meet and no pressure to keep pace. The prompts and materials will remain available throughout the year, so you can work at your own rhythm, return to things that interest you, or follow a thread wherever it leads.
The focus is always on your writing. The art, books and music are just the starting points!
- Cost, Only the Prompts: €350
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About the tutor: Shaun Levin is the author of Seven Sweet Things, Alone with a Man in a Room, and Snapshots of The Boy. Around 2012, he began making illustrated work, exhibiting at the New York Art Book Fair and the London Art Book Fair, amongst others. His recent artists' books are held in the special collections of Harvard Library, the University of Delaware Library, and the Universities of California at Irvine and Santa Barbara.
Born in South Africa, he has lived in Israel, London, and now Madrid. He is the creator of Writing Maps and has taught creative writing for thirty years. Across text and image, his work treats the book as a site of encounter: a space where inherited narratives can be questioned, reimagined, and gently repurposed.