Creative Writing: Rain

Lynn Davidson is leading a series of creative writing workshops at the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge, with the next session coming up on Tuesday 3 November. It's part of a three-part run that started on 13 October and continues through to 1 December, so you can drop in for one or stick with all of them.

The sessions are built around the library's Rain exhibition, and they take that one theme and pull it apart across the three dates. The first was Rain on the Roof: Sheltering and sharing stories on 13 October. The second, on 3 November, is Stuttering, pattering, patterning: The rhythms and sounds of rain. The final one, on 1 December, is Murmurations of rain: Inviting the shapes of rain onto the page. Each one looks at a different side of the same thing — the shelter, the sound, and the shape — so they work as a sequence, but you don't have to have been to the first to make sense of the second.

Davidson is a published poet and essayist with a PhD in poetry, and her work tends to sit where we fit into nature and the mysteries of language. That's exactly where these workshops live: they're about the rhythms, sounds, moods and patterns of rain and weather, and how to get those onto the page. It's less about a set of rules and more about working with the atmosphere of the thing.

Each session runs at 3:00 PM at the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge, EH1 1EW, and tickets are £5. You can take part in one or more of the workshops, so if you've missed the first, the 3 November and 1 December dates are still on the table.