10 joyous years ago...
I'd started planning to go freelance and teach writing courses back in 2010 and spent a long hot family holiday in Scotland pouring over my ideas for a syllabus, possible games and activities, and lesson designs – but I still ended up jumping in sooner than I'd planned. I wanted to build a buffer fund first, in my EFL teaching job, but as 2010 progressed, my endometriosis worsened. I dropped to teaching half-days, then two-hour days, and then the painkillers couldn't cover even two hours of standing upright every day. I quit my job. And now I had no choice but to make freelancing work.
I put the course outline I'd designed on a web page in my personal website and put a ten-word free ad in the Daily Info. My parents, sister, and brother in law helped Will and I carry all our stuff, and me, into our new rented house in Jericho, which had a big round table: perfect for my new course. People answered my ad, booked on the course, paid deposits. And now I really had no choice! The course was happening and I was working six-day weeks to create it alongside my editing work. The first deposits paid for the first four colours of paper. My sister bought me a laminator for my birthday (it's still going strong). I cut everything by hand until the first course fees came in and then gleefully bought a guillotine. My students asked in week 2 if they'd get feedback on their writing and I said, "Err – yes! Your first piece for feedback will be in... week 4." And so it began, on a wing and a prayer and a single web-page and a free ad for an incredibly badly named course: "The 12-week course". Because... it was 12 weeks long!
The editing was my earnings. The writing course was my passion. I knew I couldn't possibly work from home without regularly seeing people and I couldn't bear not to be teaching. It was my joy, my delight on the side, and every penny went straight back into building the business. I didn't imagine it could possibly be my sole business, so to be sitting here, 10 years later, is mind-boggling. But more on that later. First...
9 types of tea
The coffee on my courses is terrible. I admit it. It's instant, because I can't figure out an environmentally friendly, non-wasteful way to make good coffee for as many as want coffee in a short break. But hospitality is wildly important to me: I'm welcoming people into my home and I want everyone to feel at home, taken care of, treated. Hence the grapes to snack on, biscuits in breaks, arrays of condiments at lunchtime in the summer workshops, jugs full of iced mint and lemon water in the summer, chocolate stash for anyone having a hard day...
To make up for the coffee, in the first course, I proudly laid out an array of 3 teas: Yorkshire, rooibos, and peppermint. Someone asked if I had Earl Grey, so I bought that. Someone asked if I had ginger tea, so I bought that. Then came the Lapsang Souchong, the green tea, the green Rooibos tea, the decaff... actually I think there are more than that now, but those are the 9 I can name off the top of my head, and if there's anything missing that you want, just ask!
8 years of the Summer of Writing
I ran a few trial one-day workshops in 2010, before I launched properly in 2011, and after that I ditched the one-day workshops and just kept on with the 12-week course. At first, that was just about my energy and stress levels. All that marketing, just for one day, and all that stress, waiting to see if I had the numbers for the workshop to run... I couldn't face it. Later, when we moved to Wolvercote, it was a practical issue. The classes are in a south-facing glass-roofed conservatory. For evenings, that's perfect, but daytimes? Even on a winter's day, one wink of sunshine and half the class would be blinded. In summer, we'd all pass out from the heat.
My partner Will, ever the creative problem-solver, came up with a plan. What if I put a bunch of weekly workshops in a row, so I was advertising all of them at once, instead of one a month, and people could do more than one? And what if we swapped the living room and the conservatory for the summer, and I could teach in the cool airy front room, and we'd spend summer evenings on the sofa in the conservatory? I wasn't sure: would my students want one-day workshops in summer? Or maybe half-days, or full weekends, or nothing? "Ask them!" he said. So I threw a form up on the website to ask, people very helpfully responded, and suddenly I was going to run 4 workshops in the summer of 2013.
Those ideas from Will shaped everything about the Summer of Writing, but most specifically the central element: Ask them. The Summer of Writing workshops gradually evolved into a full collaboration with my students: a wish-list for people to say what workshops they'd like me to create, a voting-list for which 5 workshops run each year, a times-and-dates option to see what suits people best. When the pandemic hit and I didn't know how people would want online workshops to run, the solution was easy: just ask!
7 students round a table
The courses started with 7 students around a big round table in our rented house in Jericho, plus me. When we moved, my sister gave us square table that pulled out to seat three down each side and one at each end, so again I had 7 students max. The everyone-round-a-table set-up felt warm and collaborative, at times, but had its issues. If a student regularly sat at the far end of the table from me (I wasn't yet telling people where to sit!), I couldn't offer as much one-to-one help easily. It wasn't easy to change seats, so groupings were limited to who was sitting next to each other. 8 people is too many for conversation to flow back and forth naturally and so the louder people can end up dominating, while the quieter ones don't get to speak. Four is the ideal number for a cohesive conversation, but "grouping" people who're working at the same table doesn't work so well. I got adept at discreetly rearranging seating to match personalities for different types of exercises, always making sure it looked like I was just saying numbers in order and then grouping those numbers together, but that was working around a problem, not solving it.
7 students posed another problem, too: a very strict limit on how much I could earn from the courses. It was getting exhausting running two businesses, the editing / bookcoaching and the teaching, with two sets of marketing, two sets of websites, two sets of social media profiles. As The Writers' Greenhouse grew, I wanted to spend more time on that and create a new course, but I couldn't justify it financially: it just didn't pay enough. I'd raised my course fees a little, but not too much, and baulked at raising them further. So many writing courses are wildly expensive, which rules out so many people. I wanted to keep the courses as accessible as possible, while still supporting myself, but the courses couldn't support me. It was a catch-22 I spent hour after hour, brainstorm after brainstorm, list after list, and pages of scribbled calculations on, for years.
Will the brilliant problem-solver fixed this one too. He asked how many students I'd like to teach. From teaching EFL for years, and classes of all different sizes, I knew my ideal size: 12. Big enough for a roar of energy, small enough that I can focus on everyone, and very factorisable for grouping students in multiple different ways. "But the problem is the table," I began, but Will was already wandering around the conservatory with a tape measure and a calculating look.
"I can get 12 students in here," he said. "It would have to be three tables of four and you'd have to stand. Would that work?"
That would be bloody ideal! We carried out half the furniture, found some folding tables to buy, he built new tops for them, and finally I could group students ideally, walk around the room to make sure everyone had equal attention, and earn enough to free up some time from editing and create a new course: Imaginary Worlds.
6 workshops from the wishlist
Once the workshops were also 12 students, I could afford to spend more time creating new workshops as well. After the first "12-week course" (Story Elements) in 2011, I ran "the follow-on course" for 5 years. (Yes, I'm incredibly bad at naming things.) This was fortnightly in three-month terms with rolling enrolment, for people who wanted support with ongoing writing projects, so I was constantly creating new materials for it every two weeks. I stopped it in 2016, when my health took a real nose-dive, but that wealth of materials and constantly discussing with my students what they wanted to cover was incredibly useful. For the first few years of the Summer of Writing, the workshops came out of those lessons, collated into themes.
With no follow-on course and more time to create materials, I started the summer wishlist: tell me what workshops you want and I'll see if I can make them. My students came up with brilliant ideas! So far, 6 workshops have come directly from the wish list: A Sense of Place, Writing in Scenes, Hone Your Style, Beyond First Draft, Page Turners, and Publication. I can only make two new workshops a year (as a rule, it's 5 hours of creation time for 1 hour of teaching) so I'm hoping this year to make some of the other wishlist suggestions which didn't quite make the top five last year – especially Tropes and Archetypes!
5 new courses
For several years, I only ran one course: "the 12-week course" – which, after years of explaining on email that it covered "the key elements of stories", I renamed Story Elements. Once I raised the class size to 12, though, in 2017 I could create Imaginary Worlds. Creating new courses is a massive time investment but also a total joy: I love designing the syllabus and structure, researching the topics more, inventing activities and games. I couldn't wait to do it again and was hankering for something that would welcome everyone into this wonderful world of writing. So at the end of 2017, I created Starting Points, as a gleeful whistlestop tour of creative writing and creativity. I even snuck two lessons about poetry into it, Mary-Poppins style, because I know that once people have a go at poetry, they end up loving it. And when I saw how much they really did, in 2018 I set about scheming a new course.
By now, you see, I'd discovered several wonderful things. Because I was teaching different courses, the same students came back. The first lesson of each course was no longer a room full of total strangers: there were always some familiar faces. And surprisingly often, people would come to a course even if it wasn't their thing, because they wanted to do another course with me. People with no pre-existing interest in fantasy or sci-fi came on Imaginary Worlds, and ended up loving it. People who felt familiar with all kinds of creative writing came on Starting Points, and got a massive creative boost. For years, I'd been putting "poetry" on the workshop voting list and it never made the top 5. So I thought: sod it. If you won't vote for the workshop, how about a whole course on poetry?! Forget all the fear of elitism and snobbery, we are going to charge around this playground having fun with it! So in 2018 I started planning and working and advertising, and in 2019 launched Meddling with Poetry. (In case you can't tell, I was getting help with naming things by now. Mum named Starting Points and Will named Meddling with Poetry.)
For the fifth course, I wasn't sure whether to do something on fantastical fiction (magical realism, tall tales, etc) or on style, so, as usual, "Ask them!" I wrote up both descriptions, put it to the vote, and the majority voted for Writing in Style. (I named that one.) To be honest, I was disappointed. I had a lot of ideas of what to cover, but I wasn't sure it was going to be so much fun. And then suddenly I had to make it in a pandemic as well, with brain fog. I nearly cancelled it. I figured I could just refund the deposits, run one of the others, apologise; no-one would blame me, under the circumstances. But I know very well that every novel, every course, every workshop, every creative project, has that moment: "I can't do it and it can't be done." I girded my loins (that's fancy for got dressed), started creating it, the ideas started catching fire... and now, like every course I've just created, it's my favourite!
4 different painkillers
Throughout all this, the endometriosis that had booted me so brutally and abruptly into freelancing at the start hadn't gone away. My health was up and down like a yo-yo. Sometimes I'd be fine for a year, even a year and a half once. Other times, for months or even years I'd be too weak to sit at my desk and be working on a laptray on the sofa. The whole of Imaginary Worlds was designed from the sofa. At that point, I needed a wheelchair for any outing. (Wheelchairs are awesome, by the way, and all sorts of places have them just there for you to use: museums, art galleries, garden centres, IKEA, supermarkets. If you ever need a wheelchair, use one!) Anyone who's seen me teaching in person knows that I teach barefoot or in tights. I've always been more comfortable without shoes, I blame my barefoot South African upbringing, but I only got the courage to go shoeless in class when my endo was really bad. Any jolt hurt; I needed to step so lightly on the ground that eggshells wouldn't crack under me; I couldn't do that in shoes. The shoes went. Before teaching, I'd stay resting all day, doing as little as possible that might flare up the inflammation and pain, and carefully map out a painkiller schedule to cover the evening's teaching. My record was being on 4 different painkillers simultaneously.
The most extraodinary thing, though, is something that will sound very twee but any fellow teacher will recognise: the best painkiller is students. From the moment the first student walks in the door, the pain vanishes. Before, I could barely shuffle to the kitchen. Suddenly I'm gliding around the classroom. The pain had held my face pinched all day. Suddenly all my muscles have relaxed into joy. And when class is over and the sudents leave, the moment the door closes behind the final student... wham. I'm doubled over. I can no longer even stand.
For teachers who love teaching, as I do, there's a magic in it. I call it a "teaching high". It's this rush of joy, focus, laughter, peace – and, it would seem, analgesics. Happily, I haven't needed the other kind of analgesics in a while, because I've had...
3 years of perfect health
Three years! Three years of not needing painkillers, of going on walks, of cooking whenever I want, of cleaning the house, of sitting up writing in parks and pub gardens for hours on end, of lifting and carrying things, of working at a desk, of seeing something on the floor and just bending to pick it up...! Bit of a shame that one of those years I've been trapped indoors by a pandemic, but on the bright side, I'm extremely good at being stuck at home and at letting all plans be provisional, floating in the ether of possibility, and at least this time I'm well. I haven't been this well in decades! It's no coincidence that three of the five courses and all six of the new wish-list workshops were created in just three years of the ten years I've been running The Writers' Greenhouse: I've been well! And long may it last!
2 houses, 2 names
The courses started, as I said, in our rented house in Jericho, around that huge round polished table. At the end of 2012, we were lucky enough to be able to buy our first house, in Wolvercote, a hop and a skip from the green and the common, with enough little woods and canal paths and weirs to bring a heart peace.
When I started teaching, I called my wee business "The Writers' Circle", based on that original round table, in the first house. When I realised it needed a more distinctive name, easier to Google, we'd already moved and I spent hours brainstorming, despairing, trying to dream up something that said how I wanted to teach, what I believed teaching creative writing was: a place to nurture and protect things so they could grow, but not a hot-house with its implications of hasty forcing; a warm inviting place; a peaceful place full of greenery; something practical and sensible, not elitist or esoteric... It was only after a year and a half of growing things on the conservatory windowsills, winding climbers along strings, washing terracotta pots to set out, that it finally clocked: a greenhouse. A safe place to grow, so that later you're strong enough to thrive in the outside elements. That's what I wanted to give my students. And it became The Writers' Greenhouse.
1 estatic grateful teacher
Four years ago, my brother bought us both lottery tickets with the same numbers, for a massive rollover week. He asked what I'd do if I won. I started talking about paying off mortgages, and family who needed houses, and educational trusts for cousins' children, and he cut me off.
"Megan, not that stuff. There's so much money that you could do all of that and still have enough left to live on for the rest of your life. So after you'd done all that stuff, what would you do? How would you live?"
I thought. Most of the stuff I want isn't things you can exactly buy. "Well, I'd write," I said.
"You do that already."
"Yeah, but I'd write more. I'd knock the editing stuff on the head, and have more writing time."
"And the teaching?"
"Oh god no, I'd keep the teaching! I love teaching! Besides, I need people!"
After that, every writing day, I'd remind myself that I'm living my millionnaire lifestyle. This is me, as a millionnaire: bent over a sheet of fullscap, scribbling. And over the past two years, thanks to my students' support, enthusiastic recommendations, and collaboration in creating new courses and workshops, I could finally start to push the editing / book-coaching to one side. Last month, I officially took down that site and replaced it with an announcement that I was now working full-time as The Writers' Greenhouse. I am, officially, living my millionnaire dream.
At the end of each workshop and course, I send out an email with any links or info people needed, and my very effusive thanks for being such wonderful students. I do it every time and it is always, always one hundred percent sincere. Sometimes the wording is similar, because there are only so many ways one can say "thank you" without launching into poetry. (I do write effusive poems about my students as well, mind! But I don't email those out.) So much of the last ten years has been collaborative, with people generously putting forward their preferences, suggestions, and ideas, but actually every class and workshop is a collaborative experience: that group of people, those interactions, and those insights, are unique. So to everyone I've had the privilege to teach over the last ten years: a very heartfelt, actually even quite soppy,
