creative writing /

Tales from the Treasure Trove

Tales from the Treasure Trove – creative writing with The Cuming Collection
June 6 2026, 11.00am – 1.00pm
Southwark Heritage Centre and Walworth Library, 145-147 Walworth Road London SE17 1RW

Objects are alive! They hold secrets of people and places, take you to other worlds, reveal histories and cultures, are containers for memories and emotions. And they can be a way into the imagination. I am leading a creative writing workshop inspired by objects from the Cuming Collection. I will guide participants with playful and flowing creative prompts and tasks to explore the collection at Walworth Road Library. Judy Aitken, the Curator of the Cuming Collection, will talk to us about the collection and bring some rare treasures from the storeroom for participants to look at closely and even touch!

Objects are powerful! They help us ask who made them, how and why. A tiny object can tell us about climate and landscape, migration and social structures. I have been working with objects in galleries and museums for many years, creating stories that bring objects to life through narrative performance. I see my role as guide to the imagination, taking the audience inside an object to reveal hidden worlds of culture, history and myth. My aim is to help the audience see through the object – to the imagination of the people who created it.

I have been working with The British Museum for many years. And in 2010 they commissioned me to write and perform six interlinked stories for their exhibition ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’. The stories were told in cliff-hanging instalments over a whole year. I time travelled across six objects, from the delicate carving on a mammoth tusk of two reindeer swimming dated to 13,000 BCE, to a throne of weapons made in 2002 from decommissioned weapons collected after the devastating civil war in Mozambique. Audiences returned to different galleries and objects over the year to hear the next instalment. Time passed from hunter-gatherer society to the modern world, the making of objects connecting us to our distant ancestors, who like us created objects to express who they were, to wonder about existence, transmit meanings and change things.

Objects are mysterious! Join Judy and I with The Cuming Collection to uncover hidden histories. We will get you looking at objects in detail, and guided by inspiring prompts you will create poems based on hand-written labels, find a memory inside a teacup, imagine the owner of a giant key, dream over a map! You will explore ways to combine fact and fiction, delve into social history and play with sheer invention. Tales from the Treasure Trove is based on real life objects but takes you into a world of imagination!
The workshop is free but you need to book here!

creativity /

The Flower of Story

Why do we tell stories? Why do we need Stories? Why are stories important to our lives?

Can you remember a story you loved as child? Can you recall an image from that story that has stayed in your imagination? What can you see? How does the image make you feel? And what does remembering the story remind you of?

Close your eyes for a moment. And see what images and feelings emerge.

These are treasures from the deep. If we are lucky, the seeds of stories get planted in us from a young age. Stories sow seeds inside us that never go away. These seeds become food for our imaginations that we can draw upon throughout our lives. These seeds of story might portray courage, offer hope, suggest ingenuity. They also offer a symbolic way of seeing the world, where the impossible can happen, and you can be everything in the story. They might show you how to outwit the monster, trick a witch, escape from the tower that has no doors, ride on a fox’s tail, sip the water of life.

I have dedicated my life to stories and have been telling and writing stories for more than 35 years. My particular love is traditional folktales, fairytales and myths – these stories belong to us all, link us together and connect us with our ancestors. Recently I have been distilling my knowledge and experience of stories and storytelling into distinct forms and shapes that can clearly communicate my understanding.

The Flower of Story is my way of describing the living process of storytelling. How do stories get planted? How can you grow a story? How does a story bloom inside the listener? And what happens when stories are scattered? The Flower of Story – plant, grow, bloom, scatter – is a process that keeps stories alive and relevant to each audience, and is how similar stories appear in different parts of the World.

I am running a short workshop for beginners about The Flower of Story. It is on 22 November, 2-5pm, at the October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester St, London WC1. We will explore what makes a story. I will help you connect with your own heritage of stories – even if you think you don’t have one! We will look at what makes a story memorable and tellable, and I will help you develop some storytelling skills. It will be creative and playful. Come and find out why we need stories now. And how you can bring stories and storytelling into your life and for those around you. Find out more and get a ticket!

creative writing /

Walking with Words

We have had all weathers at West Norwood Cemetery in the last month. Lashing rain soaking our pages, washing away pencil jottings, deep delightful dappled shade, uplifting wind filling hearts and skirts, scalding heat slowing us down. My four week creative walking and writing course in nearly over. One participant said, “I was so excited it was going to last four weeks, now I feel greedy and I want to go on and on.”
         The course has combined walking and writing, wandering and wondering. I wanted the course to be a way of opening to the imagination and the world of stories that is both outside and inside.
    “A walk is only a step away from a story and every path tells,” writes Robert MacFarlane in his multi-layered ‘The Old Ways – a journey on foot’. I wanted participants to observe, collect, imagine and create their own stories through walking.

I divided the cemetery into four sections, four walks, each on a different theme: the senses; beauty; time and trees, and the final walk – then and now. The walks were inspired by different areas in the cemetery. The theme of beauty linked to the Greek influence in the cemetery, from the many gothic graves referencing ancient Greek architecture, to the Hellenic Enclosure bought by Greeks in 1842 for Orthodox burials, with its own chapel, St Stephens, a mini acropolis, recently restored. We explored ancient Greek ideas about beauty, and Plato’s description of beauty as a ladder to immortality, that climbs from physical beauty, through “the great mass of mortal rubbish” to ideas about beauty, to “beauty itself” where “beholder and beheld become one.” ‘The Symposium’.

I led the group down secret paths, passed: tombs of tumbled stones; carved women draped with stone cloth; squirrels sculpted and real; stone angels; green flash of parakeets; curling carved ivy; stone roses; bunches of carved lily of the valley; a lone fox who knows all secrets paths; stone birds; stone vases; stone masks, even a stone lamb. And some stones carved to look like metal, others carved to look like monuments from neolithic times, or obelisks from the future. There really are stories in every step and I wanted participants to “bodily enter a story by walking it” as Rebecca Solnit writes in ‘Wanderlust – a history of walking’. Looking for stories everywhere is just a state of mind, and I wanted to give participants some keys to do this, through: observation; listening; collecting images; finding found words along the way; picking up fragments of text from graves; catching fleeting thoughts and memories triggered by strange architecture hidden among brambles, daisies and deep trees. I wanted them to listen out for stories, feelings, tangents, that pop up inside us all, and jot them down. Practicing catching the first idea, before it has gone, before it vanishes and other thoughts creep in, is always the best in my experience! Many participants had not done anything like this before and did not think of themselves as writers or storytellers. But with a few keys, they soon were connected to their imaginations, and moving, powerful, beautiful words flowed out.

Robert MacFarlane writes that a path leads “onwards in space but also backwards in time.” And walking the paths we imagined them arranged back in 1837, and then we slipped backwards to the meadows sweeping up the hill, and before that to the dense, mysterious Great North Wood that covered parts of south east London. Some 13 majestic oak trees in the cemetery are more than 500 years old and were part of that old wood. Solnit says that humans are words that walk. Walking corresponds to language, walking is a language, and in Walking with words we have walked our talk. “Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind and walking travels both terrains.” Rebecca Solnit. I have written my own song to West Norwood Cemetery and will post it another time.

The lush, hidden nature along the paths has restored us all. The cemetery is peaceful and rejuvenating, calming and energising, this place of death is so alive, so very alive.

Thankyou to Teresa Donoghue and West Norwood Cemetery and Thriving Norwood for funding this course so it could be free for participants, and for allowing me to be inventive, and supporting me to create and lead it.