I had a dream (or, be careful what you wish for...)

The origin story of The Writers Workshop

Let’s set the scene. I imagine I’m sitting on the wide slab of gritstone at Higger Tor in the Peak District, perched on a ledge with a wide vista of changing skies, heather and moorland stretched out ahead of me. Problems seem small when I’m up here, like the tiny cars that snake along the winding road around the corner and out of sight towards the picturesque village of Hathersage. This is my thinking spot, my dreaming stone, my anchor. It is a setting suited to lofty visions and deep conversations like the one I’m having with my boyfriend. I’m around twenty-eight years old. I’ve quit my brief marriage and my even briefer foray into the world of teaching. I’ve also quit my time as acting manager of a youth literacy project having refused to train some numpty who’s been redeployed from the defunct ski slope to do my job on my youth worker’s salary of eight thousand pounds, and then the job as lifeskills worker with young homeless people because the role is impossible in the hours I’ve been given. You might call me a serial quitter. My boyfriend is a quitter too. He’s left London and the stultifying world of town planning in search of a creative adventure and a better life balance in the north. We are lost souls, both of us looking for a new direction,

‘What’s your dream?’ he asks me.

I’m in the middle of an MA in Writing but I struggle to put it into words and strangely I don’t say that my dream is to be a successful writer. My dream is just a hazy image, shrouded in the valley’s mist. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I’d like to have some kind of shop. Like a writing shop. A little room, maybe a cafe, where people can come and write. With writing prompts and books. Something magical.’

‘It’s lovely to see you dream,’ he says. ‘You light up.’

Those are the best dreams, aren’t they? The ones that ignite fires and brighten eyes.

Like all privileged lost souls, we take a trip around the world and then I return to another brief stint working with homeless people, this time as a social policy offer. It is worthy work but it drains me. Policies and procedures do not light my fire. I’m starved of creative challenges, so I make a boardgame about homelessness and soon I have quit again. I get a job with The Reading Agency devising projects to make libraries appealing to disaffected teenagers. I’m thrilled to be back in a creative role and before long, adjacent to this work, I’ve set up a young writers’ project in the children’s library of my home town. I love it, coming up with writing exercises, watching the spark of recognition in the young people as they delight in this community of oddballs who toss words and ideas around like other kids toss basketballs. We are at home here.

I quit the relationship with the town planner and take up with someone new. Soon, I’m pregnant with my first child and forced to leave my young writers’ project; the timings and funding situation are incompatible with being a mother. I carry on doing some consultancy for The Reading Agency from home and, after a few years and a second child, I begin working for a local writing project as a part-time project manager. It fits in well around my life as a mother but I’m struggling as my work becomes more and more about business admin and less about creativity. I’m working in the arts but the arts need funding and accounts need keeping. And I am undiagnosed ADHD. My second child is also chronically unwell, my mum has cancer and I’m in a relationship that is slowly strangling me. I write the children’s father a letter quoting Yeats and he marks it with red pen, footprints on my dreams.

The Arts Council is saying we need to income-generate so I persaude my boss to support me in training as a coach and then I develop a side-arm to the project, charging people to write in a neighbouring office, developing coaching and mentoring services and offering a few paid-for workshops and masterclasses. But our income-generating schemes are not enough. Our leader takes off to live with his partner, the business manager we’ve employed to take the strain off me is not a good fit and my relationship finally falls apart. We lose our NPO status and ultimately our funding. Everything crumbles. We have a meeting to discuss the assets of the organisation: some writing books, an old pc, a display board, some folders of writing resources, a box of pencils and a stapler. They need to be passed onto a like-minded organisation.

‘I’ll take them,’ I say. ‘And set something else up.’ I take over the rental contract for the tiny office that we have been subletting to writers and, sadly, we walk away.

Time concertinas. I adjust to being a single parent. I gain a boyfriend and swiftly lose him to ill-health. My mother is fading. I meet someone new. She dies. Then he dies. Things fall apart again. The lights all go out.

Incapacitated by grief and trauma, I’m still paying rent on the tiny project base in town where the boxes of writing books sit unused. But the little writing group that I set up is still going. We meet in an assortment of cafes and they hand me notes and coins for my time. It is the only work I can manage. In the darkness of my grief, this group is a lantern. A haven where I still find joy.

Slowly, I begin to recover. I clear out the old office and store the resources in my cellar. I sort through my mother’s estate and wonder what to do with the money I have inherited. I move house and unpack my dreams, weighing them in my hands, listening to see if I can hear my soul ignite. For this is how I live now, moving always towards anything that tips the scales towards the light and away from the sadness that threatens constantly to consume me. The project I promised to set up is still there. And that fuzzy dream, still shrouded in mists or cobwebs, it’s hard to tell which. Something about a shop, or a cafe. I start to look at buildings but there is insurance to think about and maintenance, procedures that drain me. And then I remember that I can barely look after myself and my own home and that I’m a traumatised single parent. I give up on the idea of managing a building and look for somewhere that I can run workshops from. My Wednesday group is now meeting in a cafe with no heating and when we do mindful writing exercises they are observing breath like smoke in the freezing air and their poems are all brittle fingers. I long for a room of my own.

I try out a couple of new venues but the spaces are multi-purpose, rents are too high and twice we turn up to find a yoga class in our room. It’s no good. I ask Facebook for help. Over the years of organising writing activity in Sheffield, I’ve gained a lot of contacts. Surely someone can suggest a venue. And, Bingo! I get the perfect response. A new cultural development offers to build me a workshop of my own at no cost. I’ll be able to run workshops from there and all I have to do is bring the writing community to this fabulous building where there will be co-working, an events space, a cafe and a food hall. It sounds too good to be true. (Spoiler alert: it is). I work tirelessly unpaid for months bringing people to the building, signing people up to the membership which has somehow merged with that of another business, the money going through their website and not mine. Promises are not delivered on, my workshop space has not materialised and we are sharing spaces with other businesses. Stress levels are rising and trust is breaking. My dreams are being crushed underfoot and I’ve barely earned a penny. We launch the project like a half-built ship in October 2019 and by December I am contemplating mutiny. But this is my dream. How can I walk away from my own creation?

On a Wednesday in December 2019 we sit as we have sat many times before, a band of merry writers in the wood-pannelled hull of the boardroom which has become our temporary home. In hushed tones, we speak of the plan. Soon, notebooks abandoned, we scurry to a tiny space at the top of steep steps in a regenerating part of town. We’re let into a white, empty space, a room in the sky. Joe (I’m picturing him now as the cabin boy) paces the deck, measuring it in strides, imagining the scene: a table here, some benches on that side to save space, bookcases of course, tea and coffee over in the corner. We colour the walls in our imaginations and add some finishing touches.

‘I think it could work,’ he says.

Acting on impulse, I phone the agent and say that, yes, I will take it though I have no idea how to make it pay and no business plan and no idea what I will say to the hoards of writers at the place that shall not be named. I spend Christmas painting. I get a long dining table delivered from John Lewis and find a dresser on Facebook marketplace. My friend and our children help me to get it up the stairs on the way to the pantomine one night. The rest of the furniture I purchase from TK Maxx which is in the arcade next door. Serendipitously it has a small range of furnishings in my colours: blues, pinks and yellows. I carry it single-handedly up several flights of stairs and place it in the workshop (it’s becoming a workshop now). Then I go wild in the post-Christmas sale on the Literary Gift Company’s website buying cute pictures and Penguin classic mugs and, on January 13th (unlucky for some) I welcome my trusty writers, finally, to a room of my own. I have to leave the name of my ship and my shipmates behind and I don’t know who will follow but, that day, we set out into the choppy waters of 2020.

The years that follow, in my personal life, are even more turbulent than the years that came before but The Writers Workshop is made of sturdy stuff and while the old ship capsizes during Covid, the workshop sails on. Some time during the pandemic, I create a membership scheme and, gradually, we assemble a trusty crew of associates and a fleet of writers. We make a whole armada of paper boats from our words and launch them like messengers of love into the world.

Flash forward to 2025 and I’m in a writing workshop run by one of our newest associates whom I’ve been mentoring. She asks us to write about something that is built on the ruins of what came before and I find myself telling a version of this story. An origin story. The next day, the 13th January, a Facebook reminder of that day when the first iterarion of The Writers Workshop was born. A little shop for writers. A dream made real. The thing I didn’t quit. A place of love and magic and creativity. A lighthouse with a lantern that didn’t blow out.

I think about letting it pass unnoticed but it is Wednesday and I’m meeting my little group there so I buy cake and flowers and a new mug for the space. It’s been a long journey from that rock to here, 25 years later. Happy Birthday to this writer’s tenancious dream.

I’m so proud of what I and my team have achieved at The Writers Workshop. It’s a truly wonderful thing because it was built of dreams and love and magic. But I wrote the subheading because dreams take work and, the bigger the Workshop gets, and the more successful it is, the more work it is and the more my days are filled with unpaid admin -finances, policies and procedures - the things that drain me. I incorporated the Workshop a year ago because I want it to have a life beyond me and I want it to serve a wider demographic. Gradually, we assemble a team. Hopefully, funding will come. I know it will get bigger and better and flourish for years to come. And me? I’m a starter not a finisher. A creator, not a sustainer. I am still following the light and my dreams. I don’t know yet where they’ll lead me. Watch this space.

And the moral of the story? Be careful what you wish for. Sometimes, dreams come true.

You can find The Writers Workshop in Orchard Square in Sheffield where we’re a thriving community of creative souls. We also have an online membership and writers join our workshops from as far afield as Brighton, Denmark and even New York. Why not join us? Your membership helps to keep dreams alive and, as a currently unfunded not-for-profit organisation, membership fees enable me to pay staff to help to carry the load and to grow our provision to reach audiences that can’t afford to pay. We’d love to see you x