Workshops
The workshops that Paul offers are a subtle mixture of playful and profound, individual and in between. They can include simple exercises in movement through which the powers and gestures of language are revealed. Beginners and the more experienced are equally welcome.
Individual or group tutorials are also possible.
Richard Ramsbotham writes:
I have used a wide variety of books, often by well-known authors, when teaching Creative Writing in schools and university, but none could remotely compare with the ideas and exercises I received from Paul Matthews. These exercises work. They are simple and immediately usable in a class; they all lead to creative satisfaction: i.e. they are practically imaginative.
Fuller versions of the workshops listed are available on request, and (both in length and content) can be adapted to meet particular needs.
Workshops include:
BRINGING LANGUAGE TO LIFE
An opportunity to experience how the joyful writing tasks that Paul Matthews has gathered in his books can free the life of language and imagination from the ‘spell checks’ of information technology.
THE FABULOUS NAMES OF THINGS
’Let there be light!’ Naming has a magic to it, a creative and confirming power. As we name the world truly it opens a language for unnamed aspects of our own being.
MOVING WORDS
Children know it, poets, writers, teachers and parents need to know it - that language is movement and that movement is articulate. Exercises in writing and moving will complement each other.
FIBS AND FABLES
Playful exercises in bragging and ‘lying’ will lead to work in writing with dream narrative, fairy tale and creation myth, discovering the stories that live within and between us.
BETWEEN YOU AND ME
When ‘I’ meet ‘You’ I give you my attention, my interest, until the need arises to recreate my language to be worthy of the encounter. The ‘You’ might be the person next to you, or one of the nine Muses. It might be the tree outside the window as we write together.
WORD AND WORLD
How close up to the world can we get with our language? Are words mere labels stuck on to the world, or can they catch the life that moves in all that surrounds us?