Igniting The Green Fuse – Scriptorium of Nature

With Rachel Fleming, Colin Campbell, Manda Scott and Rachel Jamison Webster

In this workshop we  explore ways of awakening the muse, the spirit of creativity that drives not only our writing but all that moves and grows within the natural world. We approach this awakening process by tracking the images that move through us, through dreaming awake and asleep, through embodied ritual and meditative practice that forms the container from which we craft our words.

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age”
Dylan Thomas 1934

Rachel Jamison Webster

Rachel is a professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University in the US and the author of Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family, (named best book of 2023 by The New Yorker) which tells the stories of her ancestors to explore race, identity, genius, and justice in American history. She has also published four books of poetry, including Mary is a River. Rachel’s ancestors hail from the American Midwest, Ireland, England, France, Senegal, and Guinea. Her teaching interests include the process of meditative creative writing to access ancestral story and archetypal insight and she creates safe and transformative spaces for people to share their personal and ancestral stories. She co-teaches Writing With The Dead with Daniel Foor at Ancestral Medicine.

Manda Scott

Manda Scott is an award-winning novelist, host of the international chart-topping Accidental Gods podcast and co-creator of the Thrutopia Masterclass.

Best known for the Boudica: Dreaming series, her previous novels have been short-listed for the Orange Prize, the Edgar, Wilbur Smith and Saltire Awards and won the McIllvanney Prize.

Her latest novel ANY HUMAN POWER is a ‘seismic’ Mytho-Political thriller which lays out a Thrutopian road map to a flourishing future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.

Welding the power of intergenerational connection to combat the sting of death and the vicious vengeance of a dying establishment, it opens the doors to a new way of being.

Colin Campbell

Colin Campbell works with African Mythology and the wisdom traditions of South Africa, specifically those that are based on our relationships with the ancestors and spirits of nature. He looks at where these ancient indigenous practices collide and coalesce with the knowledge and belief systems of the west.

One of the most unique and precious treasures Colin Campbell bears is that he is one of the few who were accepted, taught and initiated by some of the wisest pre-industrial African knowledge carriers who lived in Southern Africa. Sadly, due to the decline of this indigenous culture and its associated natural habitats, Colin and his younger brother Niall, are now amongst the rarest-known custodians of ancient sacred African knowledge systems.

Find out more about Colin on https://colincampbell.co.za/

Rachel Fleming

Rachel Fleming has worked with animist education for many years, designing and delivering educational programmes for Schumacher College, University of Wales Trinity St Davids and Embercombe, with a focus on the meeting place between human, spirit and nature, between ‘ecology’ and ‘spirituality’. She is co-founder and curator of the Contemporary Animism programmes and loves to convene conversations that explore the deepest depths of why we are here, the ways we find belonging to the world and how to be in service to soul. She is committed to scholarship, word magic, creative imagination and the medicine of circles.

This is the first of six workshops included in the Nature Scriptorium Online Writers Circle.

Find out more here

Nature Scriptorium