The Language of Care: an eight-week poetry workshop series for Carers (Week 6)

Calling all adult carers, 18+. Based in London, especially Lewisham.

A carer is anyone who provides unpaid support to a family member, partner, friend, or neighbour who could not manage without their help due to illness, disability, mental health needs, addiction, or age.

Join award-winning poets Rachel Long and Cecilia Knapp for an inspiring eight-week poetry journey that offers carers the opportunity to pause, reflect, and transform lived experience into powerful creative writing.

Hosted by London Writers Centre, this series invites carers to explore the richness and complexity of your everyday lives through poetry. Together, you'll write into the tenderness and exhaustion, the humour and resilience, the invisible labour and unexpected beauty that caring can hold. We'll make space for the stories that often go untold, honouring both the care you give to others and the parts of yourself that deserve attention too.

Across eight supportive and dynamic workshops, you'll encounter inspiring poems from contemporary and classic writers, take part in imaginative writing exercises, and experiment with different poetic forms and techniques. No previous experience of writing poetry is needed. Only curiosity and a willingness to explore.

Together, we'll ask questions such as:

How does caring shape the way we experience time, memory, love, and loss?

What parts of ourselves become hidden, transformed, or strengthened through caring?

How can poetry capture the rhythms, rituals, and quiet moments of everyday life?

What does hope look like alongside uncertainty?

Where do joy, humour, anger, tenderness, and resistance coexist?

How can writing become an act of witnessing, self-expression, and connection?