I recently had the privilege of being selected to attend the Raise the Bar Emerging Writers retreat at the beautiful Barley Wood House in North Somerset. The retreat was facilitated by poets Rachel Long and Nikita Gill (who is one of my heroes!) who delivered one to one feedback sessions with each poet as well as incredible group writing workshops. We also heard one another perform through an open mic evening, and we had plenty of time to get to know each other, write and enjoy the grounds.

It was also brilliant to have Raise the Bar team members offering their own workshops and I particularly enjoyed Kat Lyons’ skills workshop, which really helped me identify my goals as a poet, and develop confidence in my voice and things I want to say.

In Nikita’s workshop she asked us to really think about what kind of work we wanted to make, what we wanted our poetry to do. I wrote that I wanted my poetry to “tell the truth about how shit things can be, while leaving the reader/listener with an unshakable feeling of hope that they won’t stay that way”.

As we shared our thoughts in the debrief session my word of the weekend was ‘seeds’. I felt I had been given so many seeds, so many beginnings of things. New dreams, poems, ideas, possibilities and potential. Now its time to water them and watch them grow!

A huge thank you to everyone at Raise the Bar for such an incredible opportunity, and to Rachel Long and Nikita Gill for being such brilliant facilitators. This was a weekend I will remember forever.