Nature Scriptorium
An Animist Writing Circle
October 2025 – April 2026
With Rachel Fleming, Colin Campbell & Manda Scott
Guest contributors including Hazel Henderson, Maddy Harland and John Higgins
Online
Course Structure & Fees
Online Course
7 online Writing Circles
Time: 6.30 – 8.30pm UK time
Dates:
- 2 October
- 4 November
- 4 December
- 15 January
- 19 February
- 9 March
- 9 April
5 Online Saturday Workshops
Time: 4 – 8pm UK time
Dates:
- 20 September
- 18 October
- 14 March
- Two more dates TBC
Fees
Online Place: £620
We have a number of lower cost places set aside for people from South Africa. To apply for a lower cost place please fill in the application form.
An Invitation
In the early days, and in some places now, there were holy people, the saints and monks, the scribes and poets, who would offer themselves as intermediaries between this world and the other. They would sit in those 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 sacred words and instructions they heard. These would be offered as gifts and guiding lore to their villages and communities, sometimes they would become the origin of myth.
In these times now, when we listen for the wisdom of a world beyond, when we strive to understand the primary text of nature and the lore of the land, and we look for guidance for imagining a future in which all things thrive, we invite you to sit beside those veils again.
Nature Scriptorium is an online writing circle for those who would listen more deeply to the voices beyond our busy world, to hear the other-than-humans that live beside us, to the ancestors and the spirits of places that inhabit our land unseen.
In our time together as a circle of scribes, we will tune our ears to the subtle frequencies and with pens in hand, we will commit ourselves to the ritual practice of reciprocity with the natural world, we will aim to hear the quieter conversation, the common wild tongue, and we will translate and offer it back to our communities in service of our future and past generations.
Who is this for?
This is for anyone who writes, either for themselves or others, and would like to connect to a deeper source of inspiration and information. 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 writing from there.
We will have monthly circles for sharing and for group ritual, interspersed with five 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.
Five Workshop Themes
- Tracking The Creative Muse & Other Origin Stories
- A Romantic Vision, The School of Sensibility
- Writing With Nature, Conversations With Others
- Writing With Ancestors
- Writing For The Future, A Thrutopian Vision
Your Guides
The lead guides of this course are Rachel Fleming, Colin Campbell and Manda Scott.
Colin Campbell works with 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 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 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 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.
Professor 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 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.