Meeting Myself on the Page: Facilitating embodied writing spaces // with Nicky Torode

Class Description 

This course explores how to facilitate writing spaces where participants can meet themselves on the page—through memory, reflection, and lived experience. Moving beyond distinctions between journaling and memoir, it focuses on writing as a site of encounter, where something already present can be recognised, re-seen, and brought into language.

Designed for facilitators of writing workshops, the course centres on how the space is held. Through guided writing experiences, participants will explore how tone, pacing, presence, and restraint shape what becomes possible in a group.

Each session follows a simple rhythm of entering, opening, holding, and closing the field. Participants will engage both as writers and as facilitators-in-reflection, using a Head–Heart–Gut Field Notes practice to notice what is emerging in the writing, the room, and their own responses.

Across the four weeks, these reflections will build into a Personal Field Guide—supporting each participant to articulate their own approach to facilitating embodied writing spaces.

This is not a course in writing craft, but in the subtle practice of creating conditions where meaningful writing and self-recognition can occur.

Week By Week 

Week 1: Entering the Field — Arrival, Attention, and Orientation

Participants will work in a dual role throughout the course: as writers within each exercise, and as facilitators-in-reflection, noticing what this reveals about their own practice.

We begin with Arrival—“shaking the road dust”—simple writing invitations that help participants transition into the space and into themselves. These are followed by Surveying the Field: noticing what is present in their immediate environment and attention, as a way of grounding awareness before writing more personally.

We will co-design the alliance for our shared space, modelling how facilitators establish conditions through both what is agreed and how the space is held.

We will explore how themes function within writing workshops. While sessions are designed around a clear theme, facilitators develop the ability to notice what is emerging across participants’ writing and sharing—threads that may inform future sessions or directions of work. Guidance will be shared on working with themes in a way that is both grounded and responsive over time.

Field Notes will be introduced as a reflective practitioner journal. Using a Head–Heart–Gut (HHG) framework, participants will begin to track what they notice in the writing, the room, and their own responses—building awareness of their facilitation style and growing edge.

Week 2: Opening the Field — Writing Invitations and Reflection in Practice

Participants will move from arrival into engagement through Soft Landings and Warm Ups, exploring how early writing invitations shape the energy, safety, and participation within a group. We will practise simple, accessible entry points that invite writing without pressure and support participants to begin from where they are.

We will work with a range of writing approaches, including lists, short prompts, and Write–Reflect sequences, considering how different invitations open or limit engagement. Particular attention will be given to tactile and associative prompts that bring participants into closer contact with lived experience.

Alongside writing, we will focus on discussion as a core part of the practice. Participants will be introduced to principles for holding open, supportive reflection, including how to ask questions that deepen thinking without directing it. Sample prompts and facilitation approaches will be shared and practised.

Using Head–Heart–Gut (HHG) Field Notes, participants will reflect on how writing invitations and discussion shape the tone, depth, and participation within a group.

Week 3: Holding the Field — Sequencing, Deepening, and Reflection

Participants will explore how writing sessions are sequenced to support depth and engagement over time. We begin with easy-in invitations—such as list writing—that stir recognition and resonance without requiring immediate disclosure.

We will introduce jump-in lines as a way of helping participants enter writing more freely, alongside techniques for working with lists to deepen reflection. This includes using follow-up questions to extend writing, such as noticing connections between items, or attending to what has been left unsaid.

Poetry will be introduced as a way of mirroring experience back to participants. We will explore principles for selecting poems that are accessible to a wide range of participants—using clear, contemporary language, everyday imagery, and narrative forms. A simple two-step approach will be shared: first using the poem as a point of recognition, and then as a prompt for further writing.

Participants will also consider how to build and draw on a bank of themes, prompts, and poems to support their facilitation over time.

Using Head–Heart–Gut (HHG) Field Notes, participants will reflect on how sequencing and choice of material influence depth, connection, and participation within a group.

Week 4: Closing the Field — Endings, Integration, and Ongoing Practice

This session focuses on how writing spaces are brought to a close, with particular attention to endings as an explicit and carefully held part of facilitation. Participants will explore how to prepare for endings in advance—introducing closure from the penultimate session where needed—so that participants are not surprised, especially where endings may be challenging.

We will consider ways of marking and holding endings within a session or series, allowing space for recognition, reflection, and transition without closing down what has emerged.

Participants will also explore approaches to evaluation that support learning without reducing the experience. This includes light-touch evaluation practices embedded throughout a session—such as capturing a word or phrase in response to the experience—and simple reflective questions following writing, for example: How easy was it to enter this prompt?

We will revisit themes across the course, considering how they travel and evolve over time, and how facilitators can work with these as “living themes” beyond a single session.

Drawing on their Head–Heart–Gut (HHG) Field Notes, participants will shape a Personal Field Guide—identifying their own principles, strengths, and growing edge as facilitators of embodied writing spaces.

Who Should Take This Class

This course is for facilitators of therapeutic and reflective writing spaces who want to deepen how they hold conditions for intimate, creative, and generative work.

It is particularly suited to those working with journaling, life writing, or autofictional writing in community, educational, or professional settings, where participants are invited to explore personal experience through writing.
The course will benefit practitioners who already hold writing spaces and are looking to refine how they create environments that feel safe enough for vulnerability, while remaining open, responsive, and creatively alive. This includes working with embodied writing—engaging the whole person in the act of writing, and noticing how this shapes the tone, depth, and authenticity of what is written.

In addition to focusing on accessible prompting and sequencing, the course explores how writing spaces are held so that embodied, intimate, and generative work can unfold.

Where and When Does this Online Course Meet?

Course sessions will take place via Zoom on 4 consecutive Wednesdays: August 5th, 12th, 19th and 26th, from 7p-8:30 PM UK Time (11am Pacific Time; 12 noon Mountain Time; 1pm Central Time; 2pm Eastern Time). 

Recordings and materials used will be uploaded onto Wet Ink, the online platform for the group, after each session. Between sessions, there will be a reflective exercise and questions on your facilitation practice (Field Notes Guide) which you can write and share on the platform.

About the Facilitator

Nicky Torode is a UK-based journaling facilitator and creative writing workshop leader, designing and delivering programmes including memoir, autofiction, Writing Edgelands, and Shapes ofStory. Her work has been delivered with organisations such as Women on Writing, Beyond Form, the Workers’ Educational Association, UK Libraries, and literary development agencies.

Alongside her writing practice, Nicky is a leadership coach and facilitator working with social impact leaders. She holds an MSc in Therapeutic Writing and is an ICF PCC coach. She also coaches within the humanitarian sector through a global coach network.

Her work brings together writing, reflection, and facilitation to create spaces where people can engage more fully with their experience and voice.

Writing Website: lifes-little-narratives.com
Coaching Website: thenarrativeturn.com
LI: www.linkedin.com/in/nicky-torode