Feminist Voice: A Six-Week Course for Writers on Women and Feminism
PLUS in-person writers' retreats coming later this year
I’m really excited to be offering a six-week online writing course for anyone who is writing about women and feminism.
About the Course
The course is named Feminist Voice: A Six-Week Course for Writers on Women and Feminism. It will consist of six two-hour writing workshops, online, which you’ll be able to access as recordings (meaning that you’ll be able to do them in your own time, allowing you to fit your writing around the demands of work, children’s bedtime and/or different time zones etc).
This course is designed for anyone who is involved or interested in writing about women and feminism. It is aimed primarily at non-fiction writers, but there will be exercises and discussion points that will also be relevant to fiction writers, poets, and writers for screen and stage. My focus is creative rather than prescriptive. I do not seek to teach feminist history or theory in these workshops, and the course is not geared towards any specific definition, theory or practice of feminism. The course is therefore intended for participants who already have their own interests in women’s lives and feminism, and some ideas for what they wish to write about. The workshops will discuss questions and challenges that punctuate the creative lives of writers whose work represents women and feminism, and I will encourage writers to reflect upon the most effective methods of communicating their own ideas and beliefs. I will support you in bringing to light the creative issues that are most relevant to your own work, and in developing your own responses. Please see below for a detailed breakdown of the course content.
About Me
I am a best-selling award-winning writer of creative non-fiction, with a focus on feminism and life-writing. I am a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and I have published four books, most recently In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors, a blend of memoir, life-writing, and feminist history of outdoor sport. I have taught creative writing for over a decade, to undergraduates, postgraduates and PhD students at universities, and also to the general public, in evening classes and online workshops. I also offer one-to-one mentoring to anyone who feels they would benefit from ongoing support for their writing projects. Later in 2025 and early 2026, I will be running a couple of three-day writers’ retreats, in person, in the north of England, which will offer intensive, supportive immersions in writing practice with myself and a small group of peers.
Course Fees and Structure
The Feminist Voice course consists of six two-hour recorded online workshops. These are not live, so you have the flexibility to decide how to do the course. For example, you could access one workshop per week, and participate in the course over a six week period. Or you could store up the recordings and do all six back-to-back, as your own online writer’s retreat in your own home. Or you could do the workshops as and when they suit you.
You have the option of purchasing workshops individually at £30 each, OR purchasing the entire course (which consists of six workshops) for £150 (a saving of £30).
You don’t need to be a subscriber, either free or paid, to my Small Revolutions, Every Day Substack in order to take part in the workshops. However, I’m offering a massive 50% discount for annual, founding and Sisterhood subscribers to my Substack. (You can read more about these types of subscriptions here.) If you have one of these subscriptions, then the workshops will cost only £15 each, or £75 for the whole course. (An annual subscription to Small Revolutions, Every Day costs £80, so you save nearly the entire cost in the course discount.) Click the button below to take our a paid subscription.
Any paid or Sisterhood subscribers to Small Revolutions, Every Day will also gain access to a chat group, where you can discuss challenges, techniques and experiences associated with writing about women and feminism with other subscribers and myself. You do have to be a paid or Sisterhood subscriber in order to access this chat.
If you sign up for the whole course now, you will receive the recordings in your inbox week-by-week. The first will arrive on Monday 16th June 2025, and the last on Monday 21st July 2025. If you sign up for the whole course at a later date, you will receive any available recordings straight away, and any others as soon as they’re made available. If you purchase individual workshops now, they’ll be sent to you on the dates below. If you purchase the workshops on or after the dates below, the recordings will be sent to you straight away.
T&Cs: Each recording is intended for ONE customer only. If you would like to do the workshops with friends, please ensure that each person has paid for their own recording. Unfortunately I cannot offer any refunds or returns on these products. Unfortunately monthly subscribers do not qualify for the 50% discount on the workshop and course fees.
Course Programme and Purchase Links
The course comprises six workshops. You can purchase the whole course, or individual workshops, by clicking on the buttons below.
Workshop 1: Overcoming the Challenges of Writing About Feminism
Recording available from Monday 16 June 2025. You can pre-order now, and it will be emailed to you as soon as it’s available.
This workshop will encourage you to articulate the challenges that shape your writing practice, and invite you to experiment with different responses. Some challenges may be practical, such as finding time to write amid the ‘second shift’ of caring and domestic tasks. Some may be linguistic, and involve the difficulties of crafting a female-friendly creative language. Some are stylistic, such as balancing memoir-based and evidence-based elements of your writing. Some are psychological, such as the perpetual awareness of critical voices stifling the development of a free and authoritative voice. The workshop will discuss ways to recognise such challenges, and to build a creative practice that is both principled and humane.
Workshop 2: Fleshing Out: Writing The Body
Recording available from Monday 23rd June 2025. You can pre-order now, and it will be emailed to you as soon as it’s available.
In this workshop, we will explore the role of the body in our writings. How do we make space for the body in our narratives, and what stories might our bodies tell? What evidence might we use, and how might we interpret it? Do different physical experiences require different creative treatments? What are some of the distinctive aspects and challenges of writing about women’s bodies, and how do we do justice to those specific characteristics in our writing?
Workshop 3: The BiographHer: Researching and Writing Women’s Lives
Recording available from Monday 30th June 2025. You can pre-order now, and it will be emailed to you as soon as it’s available.
Life-writers face particular challenges when researching and narrating the experiences of women, because there is often a relative dearth of documentary evidence. This workshop will support you in working around absences in the archives: piecing together women’s characters and lives in the face of unknowns, and extracting stories from the absences themselves. We will also think about ways of shaping narratives to fit the characteristics of particular lives, and I will support you in consciously crafting narratives whose forms reflect important aspects of your particular subjects’ experiences.
Workshop 4: Pivoting between the Personal and the Political
Recording available from Monday 7th July 2025. You can pre-order now, and it will be emailed to you as soon as it’s available.
Feminist writing often blends personal examples with sociological observation and commentary. Narrating personal experience can be a way to open a window onto the world and its power dynamics. Vice versa, writers often find it desirable to show how societal patterns are played out in individual lives, by ‘zooming in’ to personal experiences. In this workshop, we will experiment with ways to balance these elements and skilfully pivot between them.
Workshop 5: The Survivor’s Voice: Writing After Trauma
Recording available from Monday 14th July 2025. You can pre-order now, and it will be emailed to you as soon as it’s available.
As the effects of trauma on the mind and body have become better understood, it is now widely recognised that physical responses can be more eloquent in testifying to the effects of trauma than the conscious, verbal mind. This workshop will explore methods and challenges in translating the body’s experiences into language. I will encourage participants to consider how the voices of those involved in trauma - from therapists to survivors - may have differing characteristics, ‘expertises’ and intentions. The workshop will also reflect on the challenges involved in writing about patriarchal (ie. inflicted by men) trauma. NB: this is not a therapeutic workshop.
Workshop 6: Mother Tongue: Forging Female-Friendly Language
In this workshop, we will reflect on ways in which language and linguistic conventions can obstruct us in forging feminist and female-friendly writings. We will explore the power and discomfort of ‘naming the agent’, and how to visualise and address an ideal reader. This workshop is not intended to encourage any policing of language - far from it! - but rather to encourage a mindful practice of carefully and intentionally selecting words and phrasing to best convey our feminist intentions.
I’m really excited about these workshops, and about getting to know you and your writing via the chat. I love facilitating writing workshops. Writing - especially writing about women’s lives and feminism - can be quite solitary because, so often, women are encouraged to see our experiences as outlandish, unique, atypical, or downright mad. But writing is such a powerful way of resisting the patriarchy’s attempts to divide us.
Writing is how we can better understand ourselves and our own lives, by seeing them in the context of social patterns that occur across time and around the world. Writing is how we can reverse the invisibilising of women which takes place when patriarchal societies fail to preserve or commemorate women’s achievements. Writing is how we can see the artifice and falsity of the patriarchal myths that surround us, and writing is how we can build more real, female-friendly stories, free of harmful delusions. Writing is how women can build communities with other women and girls, near and far, from the past and from the present, finding commonality among our diversity. I learn so much from other writers, of all levels of experience, who are also grappling with the challenges and significance of writing about women and feminism; especially right now, in this era of profound misogynistic backlash. I look forward to sharing these workshops with you, and to discussing some of our challenges and motivations in the chat.
In sisterhood,
Rachel x