‘The Ocean Palace’ by Maurice Prendergast, 1895. Blue and white Impressionist oil painting of a ship in the ocean with seagulls in the foreground.

Mystery School is a free monthly writing ritual, led by Laura, that acts as a crucible for your weirdest work. Each month will have a different theme, and you will come away with creative ideas, and writing guidance. 

You might bring your work-in-progress to consider through the lens of liminal spaces. You might create something completely new. Like field notes for a project, automatic writing, a zine, a recipe, a radio drama. Or you might work on a novel, a poem, a story, or a play. If you are lucky you might come away with a love letter, a spell, or a hex.

This month the theme is Oceanic Feelings

The session will be on watery imagery, psychoanalysis, and collective imagining. You will have the chance to explore oceanic feelings in your own writing.

If you would like to learn more about oceanic feelings, you can listen to Jackie Wang’s compelling talk where she traces a history of oceanic feelings from the letters between Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud, where the term originated, to Marion Milner and Fred Moten. Or maybe you would enjoy reading Erika Balsom’s book An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea.

Perhaps you have an oceanic feeling of your own to explore in your writing: a dream to decode, or a body of water to trace.

You will have time to reflect on these artworks and ideas, and to write your own responses. The ritual is set up to allow you to rework something in an existing project, or to create something new.

The session will include around 20-30m writing time, as well as breaks, and a moment of grounding at the beginning and the end. You are welcome to have cameras on or off, no one will be pressured to speak unless they wish to, and you can use the chat if you prefer. There will be live closed captions enabled.