New College Festival – Creative Writing Workshop: When Prayer Doesn't Work

Margaret Somerville is running a creative writing workshop at Martin Hall, New College on Saturday 7 November, from 9:30am to 11:00am. It's titled When Prayer Doesn't Work: Expanding Our Spiritual Practice Through Writing, and it takes its name from her book When Prayer Doesn't Work (Wild Goose Publications, 2025).

It's an interactive session rather than a lecture. You'll be invited to write and draw as you reflect on identity, belonging, spiritual nourishment, gratitude, lament, wonder and hope, using words, images, silence and imagination as pathways to insight and the sacred. If you're not much of a writer, the drawing side of things means you can still get involved.

Somerville comes to this from a wide background. She holds an MDiv and a DMin and is the founder of Interfaith Alignment, a global nonprofit that creates inclusive spaces for people of diverse religious, spiritual and wisdom traditions. She's also a member of the Iona Community, spends part of the year working at Iona Abbey, moderates their Interfaith Relations Network and facilitates the digital resources for the Week of Prayer for World Peace.

The workshop is run in collaboration with the Iona Community as part of the New College Festival of Books and Belief, the School of Divinity's sixth edition of the festival, which brings together writers and thinkers from the UK and beyond to explore the relationship between literature and all aspects of belief. It runs on Saturday 7 November from 9:30am to 11:00am at Martin Hall, New College, School of Divinity, Mound Place, Edinburgh EH1 2LX.