Nature Scriptorium
An Animist Writing Circle
September 2025 – April 2026
With Rachel Fleming, Colin Campbell & Manda Scott
Guest contributors including: Hazel Henderson, Maddy Harland, Tom Hirons, Erica Nunnally, Rachel Jamison Webster, John Higgins and Polly Atkin
Online
Course Structure & Fees
Online Writers Circle
This course comprises of 7 online monthly Writing Circles and 6 Themed Workshops.
The Writing Circles encourage the group to meet virtually to share their work and participate in group ritual.
During the themed Saturday Workshops we will 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.
The themed Saturday Workshop can also be booked separately.
The workshops and circles will be recorded.
7 online Writing Circles
Time: 6.30pm – 8.30pm UK time
Dates:
- 2 October
- 4 November
- 4 December
- 15 January
- 19 February
- 9 March
- 9 April
6 Online Saturday Workshops
Time: 4pm – 8pm UK time
Dates:
- 20 September: Igniting The Green Fuse – Scriptorium of Nature
- 18 October: Romantic Sensibility – Scriptorium of Nature
- 13 December: Voice of the Other – Scriptorium of Nature
- 17 January: Writing with Ancestors – Scriptorium of Nature
- 14 March: Maps To The Future – Scriptorium of Nature
- Date TBC: Return To The Village – Scriptorium of Nature
Fees
Online Place: £620 (includes 7 online monthly Writing Circles and all 6 Themed Workshops)
We have a number of lower cost places set aside for people with low incomes. To apply for a lower cost place please fill in the application form.
An Invitation
Writing With Nature
In the early days, and in some places even now, there were those, the monks, scribes, seers and poets, who offered themselves as intermediaries between this world and the other-than-human. They would sit in places where the veils were thin, beside cave walls, at springs and trees and mountain tops, on islands and in deep woods, and take down the whispers and instructions they heard. These potent words of magic and guidance from nature would be offered as gifts and instruction to their villages and communities, sometimes they would become the origin of myth.
In these times, when we listen for the wisdom of a world beyond our own, as we strive to understand our belonging within nature, the lore of the land, the meaning and purpose of our lives, when we look for help in imagining a future in which all things thrive, we invite you to sit beside those veils again.
A Practice of Deep Listening
Nature Scriptorium is an online writing circle for those who would like to write with nature, to listen more deeply to the other than human voices beyond our busy world, to hear the stories of the land and to imagine the ancestors and the spirits of places that inhabit our places unseen.
In our time together as a circle of scribes, poets, creatives and listeners, we will tune our animal ears to subtle nature and with pens in hand, we will commit ourselves to finding the words in our human voices that can create the bridge between us. We will aim to hear the quieter conversation around us, to understand the common wild tongue of all things, and to translate and offer it back to our communities in service of future and past generations.
Who is this Writing Circle for?
This is for anyone who would like to practice and develop their listening and their writing with nature, either for themselves or others, and to listen and connect with other-than-human voices. It is for those who long to develop further their conversation with the natural world and feel called to translate what they hear there to others. This is for those who would like to see a remembering of the place of humans within nature as their original home and consider themselves as potential intermediaries in service to that change.
What will it be like?
This circle, in which we share our experience, our practice, our writing, our dreams, will be bringing together embodied ritual practice in its different forms from different traditions, with a diversity of writing practices and forms. Our intention will be to enter into a reciprocal dialogue with nature in whichever way we understand that and source our listening and our writing from there.
We will have monthly circles for sharing and for group ritual, interspersed with six more formal workshops in which we experience different ways of writing. In the interim time we will be developing our own writing and listening practices.
Includes Six Workshops
(these workshops are also available to book separately)
Igniting The Green Fuse – Scriptorium of Nature
20 September: 4 – 8pm UK time
With Rachel Fleming, Colin Campbell, Manda Scott & Rachel Jamison Webster
In this workshop we will 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 will 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. Book Here…
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age” –Dylan Thomas 1934
Romantic Sensibility – Scriptorium of Nature
18 October: 4 – 8 pm, UK time
With Polly Atkin, Tom Hirons and John Higgins
In this workshop we will explore how to write with nature, in the style of the romantic poets but contemporary to our times. We will look at how the beauty of nature, landscapes and vistas, forests and mountains, can move us into such ecstasy that we are compelled to write. We will look at how this arises within us, how we make the shift in a conscious way and how we catch poetry, prose or song infused with these moments as they arise.Book Here…
“Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth” – Wordsworth 1798
Voice of the Other – Scriptorium of Nature
December 13: 4 – 8pm, UK time
With Anna Breytenbach, Jon Young and Sarah Fontaine
In this workshop we will explore how to merge, shapeshift and contact other-than-human beings so that we may imagine ourselves to hear and speak with the voice of river, tree, owl and shrew. We will hollow our bones, attune our animal ears and work from the location of heart and intuition to receive and transcribe communications directly from the natural world. Book Here…
“The trees are whispering. I hear them say:
Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
are not lost” – Mary Oliver 1999
Writing with Ancestors – Scriptorium of Nature
January 17: 4 – 8pm, UK time
With Rachel Jamison Webster and Erica Nunnally and Colin Campbell
In this workshop we explore the possibility of writing with those who came before us. We look at meditative techniques and ritual processes for finding the voices of the ancestors, those of our line and perhaps our other kin, who have medicinal words and stories for us to tell and share in these times. Book Here…
“Banneker… had felt that he was not merely himself, but his people — a channel connecting to his father and his father before him, and even to those ‘brethren’ to come” – Rachel Jamison Webster 2023
Maps To The Future – Scriptorium of Nature
14 March: 4 – 8 pm, UK time
With Manda Scott and Hazel Henderson
In this workshop we explore methods of imagining the future and turning our tracks towards it. We are not looking for places of utopia or dystopia, but simply somewhere we can believe in and start to move towards. These are words of love, hope and subtle activism, a trail of breadcrumbs through the dark forest for all to follow. This is Thrutopia. Book Here…
“Let me keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished” – Mary Oliver, 2006
Return To The Village – Scriptorium of Nature
Contributors and date to be confirmed
Sharing our words is an act of courage and trust and in this workshop we will explore how to find ways of offering our voice into the world. Led by editors of two of the UKs most cherished nature-based publications Permaculture Magazine and Resurgence/The Ecologist, we turn towards the practical matter of returning the gifts to our village. Book Here…
Your Guides
The lead guides of this course are Rachel Fleming, Colin Campbell and Manda Scott.
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.
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.
Hazel Marshall
Hazel Marshall has a background in story training, writing, creative facilitation, coaching & creative problem solving. She has a whole variety of tools & techniques to help you come up with great ideas, find the strongest stories and then shape them.
She specialises in practical, creative, interactive sessions where that focus on the production you’re currently working on while also giving you techniques that will be useful from first storyline to final edit, including when things don’t go according to plan.
She works with people with mixed levels of experience to help them work together as they craft stories an audience will love. She has worked with teams making award winning series for Netflix, the BBC, Apple TV, Discovery & independent cinema.
Erica Nunnally
In practice, Erica works with “old medicines” by weaving together her decades of experience from her initiations as an ancestral lineage healer, traditional Usui Reiki master teacher, intuitive folk herbalist, and master teacher of yoga. Erica teaches nationally and internationally, both online and in-person, to support those who are called to explore and redefine what it means to truly be well in mind, body, spirit, and nature.
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.
Professor John Higgins
John Higgins holds the Arderne Chair in Literature at the University of Cape Town. He grew up in Bradford in the north of England, and studied at a comprehensive school there before taking up a scholarship to attend Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where his main courses were in French literature and philosophy, followed by undergraduate and graduate studies at King’s College, Cambridge, where he formally studied English literature, and informally film and theory through the Screen journal network. One of his many research interests is the romantic poets, particularly John Clare.
Maddy Harland
Maddy Harland is the co-founder of Permaculture Magazine and Permanent Publications, a publishing company dedicated to practical and leading edge solutions to global problems founded in 1990. She lives in a Devon woodland that is a designated country nature reserve with many rare wild species like dormice, pine martens, pied and spotted flycatchers, willow tits, and 12 species of bat. She studied English and American Literature under the auspices of Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia and is the author of Fertile Edges – regenerating land, culture & hope and The Biotime Log.
Tom Hirons
Tom has been storytelling publicly for over 15 years and writing for much longer. In 2015, he co-launched Hedgespoken travelling storytelling theatre and Hedgespoken Press and these are often his main focus, elliptical approaches to changing the world, blessed with plenty of Trickster and a good helping of unfathomable magic.
Polly Atkin
Polly writes poetry and nonfiction about and with nature and lives in the English Lake District. Her debut poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture was published in February 2017, followed in October 2021 by her second collection Much With Body, a PBS Winter 2021 recommendation and Laurel Prize longlistee. Her biography, Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021) is the first to focus on Dorothy’s later life and illness, and place her into Disability History. Her memoir exploring place, belonging and chronic illness, Some Of Us Just Fall, was published by Sceptre in summer 2023.
Polly has taught English and Creative Writing at QMUL, Lancaster University, and the Universities of Strathclyde and Cumbria. She holds a doctorate on Romantic legacies and the Lake District.
Anna Breytenbach
Anna Breytenbach is a South African professional animal communicator who has received advanced training through the Assisi International Animal Institute in California, USA. She’s been practising for over 20 years in South Africa, Europe and the USA with both domestic and wild animals.
Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, she holds a degree in Psychology, Economics and Marketing from the University of Cape Town. During her international corporate career that took her to Australia and then Silicon Valley and Seattle in the USA, she lived out her passion for wildlife and conservation by volunteering at various rehabilitation and educational centres.
Amongst other things she has been a cheetah handler, served on committees for wolf, snow leopard, cheetah and mountain lion conservation, volunteered at wildlife and horse sanctuaries and participated in wild wolf tracking expeditions in the Rocky Mountains. Trained in tracking and mentoring at the Wilderness Awareness School (USA), she also mentors children and adults in nature awareness based on the ways of original humans who lived close to the earth.
Jon Young
Jon Young is known around the world as a leader in deep nature connection having mentored and trained people for over 40 years on the nearly lost arts of bird and animal language and tracking. Mentored by Tom Brown Jr in the ancient and powerful skills of our hunter gatherer ancestors – he is the author of What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World (2013) and Coyote’s Guide to Connecting To Nature (2007) and has appeared in numerous documentaries including The Animal Communicator (2012)
His current project is Living Connection 1st Village:
Sarah Fontaine
Sarah is a wildlife tracker, interspecies communicator and nature connection facilitator. Greatly informed by over 20 years as a professional massage therapist and bodyworker, her practice includes Interpersonal Neurobiology, Polyvagal Theory, Somatic Trauma Integration, Emotional Clearing, Craniosacral Therapy, Chakra Work , Traditional Chinese Medicine and Five Elements Theory.