What kind of environments fire your imagination? Architectural grandeur or crumbling dereliction? Wild landscapes or carefully curated gardens? A building you feel intimately connected to, or somewhere quite alien? In this Masterclass place and social history writer John Grindrod will help you think of new ways to help write yourself into buildings and landscapes, working out what makes a great setting to write about, and how to find a new angle to explore in the most familiar of locations. We’ll think about how we can synthesize research with on-the-ground responses and will try some exercises to help us think differently about place: how to evoke its mood, character and strangeness, to make it exciting afresh for the reader. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll free ourselves from the expectations of how certain places ‘should’ be written about and responded to. Instead, we’ll find new ways of expressing our own voices and personalities through our experience of different landscapes – and to help turn those disparate responses and places into a strong idea for a book.

The Masterclass will be delivered via Zoom webinar, so you can take the session at your own pace, without the pressure of having your video or camera on. Sessions are also recorded so if you are unable to attend live, you will have access to the recording for a month afterwards.

Find out more here.