Will you form a link in The Chain?
It's the "I'm in" form everyone's* been asking for
✨A Global Top + Rising 100 Substack Publication✨
Asking “What Now?" as we rattle roughshod over the peaks and troughs of perimenopausal post-therapy midlife.
Facilitating your therapeutic journaling + memoir-writing journey in joyous community.
Wait no longer, friends. The “I’m in” form is below.
Free subscribers can take part by upgrading to an annual Membership which is the best and most cost-effective way to immerse yourself in the Membership including my upcoming live courses, Writing for Better Health course replays, my entire audiobook, the archive of over 200 posts, the Cost of Caring interview series and our monthly group chats. I’d love to get to know you better:
After upgrading, click this link and fill out the quick registration form. There is a question on inclusivity and accessibility I’d especially love your reflections on…
And if you missed Sunday’s post then let me summarise The Chain…
Yes, like the song. Like the BBC 6 Music feature you might hear on your radio each weekend morning. The Chain is a six-week-long experiment of co-creation where — this July and August — we take a creative leap of faith to write together. We’ll work quickly — with ferocity and charge — in six live Sunday sessions (possibly one am and one pm depending on demand) to produce up to six slices of personal narrative each.
The Chain is for you if…
You’d benefit from fresh ideas for your life writing
You enjoy using others’ writing as prompts
You love discussing the craft of memoir
You work best in community with an element of accountability
You want to challenge perfectionism in the work you share
You have ambitions to create a body of work and want a manageable way to kickstart it
You’d like the chance to be edited by me and have your work published here to my readership of 2K+ subscribers
Imagine getting to the end of August having met the challenge to create your own collection of six pieces. Pieces you might polish up, redraft or develop or even use as material for your own publications at the project’s end. If you don’t yet write for a readership, this project offers the opportunity to write for mine.
I want to thank you for the Memoir course over the past weeks, it has been life changing. I'm not sure if I mentioned to you that this is my first live writing course ever, so it's really opened my eyes to what's possible for me. I'm so excited, and so grateful to you for creating a space both for learning but also just for being as someone who writes.
Memoir in a Month delegate, 2025
How will it work?
It starts with one piece of life writing published here on the first Sunday in July, and I’ll be revealing our Guest Writer in a few weeks’ time. Writers in The Chain will read that piece then meet online for an hour to share reflections and chat about memoir and creativity before setting off for 40 minutes to craft a brand new piece of writing that speaks in some way to the prompt piece. It doesn’t continue the narrative: the prompt sparks you to write from your experience.
Then it’s up to you. You’re welcome to keep what you write to yourself or you can submit it there and then at the end of the hour in the comments (which are closed to the Membership, so the whole internet isn’t reading!).
The first draft is a level playing field.
In those short submissions, I’ll be looking for the next week’s prompt piece. A spark of something that will offer writers in The Chain the next, rich opportunity to respond. The chosen piece will then benefit from a light edit from me and one final pass from the writer before it’s published to my full subscriber list the following Sunday.
After which we begin again…
I’m so excited to imagine how these pieces might speak to one another. How they’ll look and feel alongside one another, each another link in the chain…
I’m thinking about the power of co-creation. The magic of writing on the fly. The confidence that writing together affords us. Letting the first idea be the best one. Trusting the creative process and writing into uncertainty. Without a plan.
I’m imagining we can aim to write a vignette each in our Sunday sessions. A scene that might play with form, genre, voice. A slice of life that forms an impression. It doesn’t need a beginning, middle and end. In it, you'll dip us into your internal logic and landscape then haul us out again before we get too deep.
In each of the weekly live sessions, I’ll offer some facilitation the likes of which I share in my other expressive writing courses. Writers don’t have to come to each session but this is the best way to get six pieces of writing done across the six weeks.
Each published writer benefits from feedback on their writing and the gift of an extra year in the Membership that they can use themselves or share with a friend.
The Chain is open to annual and founding Members so if you’ve been considering upgrading this is a great time to do it. Lock in a year in the Membership for £50 plus the value of the archive, my audio memoir, comments, my courses and our monthly group chat.
Questions about The Chain? Drop me a message!