the workshops

Tuesdays at Seaford Library

Come and find us at Seaford Library 15-17 Sutton Park Road
Seaford, East Sussex BN25 1QX.

We deliver 18 workshops a year on Tuesdays 2pm-4pm, in three six weekly terms. For information email narrativeworkshopsbrighton@gmail.com and to book a place, click the link:

UPCOMING DATES

24th February 2026

3rd March 2026
10th March 2026
17th March 2026
24th March 2026

31st March 2026

Fridays at WellBN Hangleton

Coming in Spring 2026 at WellBN Burwash 14 Burwash Rd, Brighton and Hove, Hove BN3 8GQ, on Fridays.

Research

Narratives encourage empathy and replace isolation with affiliation and meaning. Narrative Workshops are intellectually underpinned by the research of American social psychologist Dr James Pennebaker and American psychotherapist Dr Ira Progoff. Both their paths of research found that writing has the same effect on the brain as meditation — it can focus the mind, calm emotions and release tension and anxiety. It can alter mood and help overcome difficult thoughts and feelings, and address immediate problems. It is creative and cathartic. Participants in both studies presented various significant short-term and long-term benefits, including:

Fewer stress-related visits to the doctor
Improved immune system, lung and liver function
Reduced blood pressure
Improved working memory
Altered social and linguistic behavior
Healthier attitudes to life-threatening or chronic illness, addictions, grief and trauma
Higher self-esteem
Clearer life goals

According to nepho.org.uk, 1,762,441 people in England had contact with secondary mental health services between April 2014 and February 2015. Narrative Workshops are responding to an urgent wellbeing strategy at national and local levels promoting key activities such as connection and learning. Narrative Workshops are free, enabling people who may be excluded from other constructive therapies on offer in the area through financial constraints, to attend and receive the benefits.

Narrative Workshops CIC carried out its first pilot workshop with 16 patients at the Brighton Health and WellBN Centre in 2014. Pilot feedback (qualitative evaluation supported by the Edinburgh/Warwick scale) showed that participants gained:

emotional support
expressive writing skills
friendship and connection
a sense of perspective on their health

Anchor 1

Practice

Until you have completed a series of Narrative Workshops, it’s difficult to imagine how a poem can act as a pathway into your memory and imagination. Many people can’t even utter the word ‘POEM’ without PTSD from poetry classes at school where they read ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ without even beginning to understand why.

Outside the classroom, gathering around a poem can be as cohesive and connective as gathering round a fire. Poetry as we know it originated from stories delivered orally by a bard to his audience. To help the poet and the audience remember the story, the poet used repetition, rhythm and sound to give the poem shape and form. The same devices the ancients used are employed in poems by poets throughout the ages to this day.

It is a much-researched fact that hearing those rhythms and sounds (in everything from nursery rhymes to rap, via prize-winning poets and Romantic rock stars like Wordsworth) soothes on us a cellular level. And in the sharing and unpacking of a poem’s words, phrases, images and texture in a workshop, a bond is formed between participants as if we are gathered around a fire looking into the flames. A participant’s heart is opened by the poem, allowing them to release thoughts and memories and listen wholeheartedly to others who sit beside them.

In Narrative Workshops, we explore a poem using the ‘close reading’ method devised in US universities in the 1950s. This method is the diametric opposite of ‘studying English literature’. We read the poem a magic three times out loud, and then approach it not looking for meaning, but looking for emotion, mood, journey, sounds, images and any other observations that come up! There is no right answer, because a poem lands differently on each different person, and – even more magic – a poem will be different again when you read it a year later or three years later. It’s a miracle, but poems reflect back to you who you are at the time.