Imaginarium Homing is an in-person and online programme that encourages you to come home to yourself.
Run by Sarah Hymas and Katherine Zeserson from October 2026 to March 2027, this Imaginarium is inspired by noticing how the cycles of nature enable us to notice cycles in ourselves.
All life begins in the dark. The light stimulates growth.
The present multi-crises call on us to ground ourselves and honour our place in the world, in the face of dissonance, violence and despair. By tapping into your embodied knowing, you’ll become reacquainted with your passions, skills and capacities. You will be guided through a process which will refresh, reorientate and renew yourself within the world. This reacquaintance builds confidence in what you can offer yourself, your community and the wider world, without overcommitting or feeling guilty. The aspiration is to enable you to live with a ‘firm persuasion’, as Blake has it.
Working with our creative, physical and spiritual bodies, we will write, make, sing, move, reflect, discuss, walk, explore and unpack what rises within us as we travel.
Our work draws on the knowledge of Joanna Macy, adrienne maree brown’s thinking around Emergent Strategy, and bell hooks, as well as permaculture principles, coaching techniques, improvisation and other creative loosening practices.
Details The process begins with a four night retreat in Yorkshire. There you will be given space and a mix of directed and free-style activities to remember what you love to do and how to be, and begin to build a small community of like-minded people who want to support others as part of their learning.
Over the following four months we’ll spend three sessions together online, embedding new habits into our daily / weekly practices, and nourishing our connections with ourselves and the others in this Imaginarium and our wider communities.
Our final session together in this Imaginarium is a daylong in-person gathering in South Cumbria. This will be a gently activating day of talk, play, fire and food.
Who’s it for
Anyone who’s wanting (trying / struggling / needing ) to create in this time of dissonance. Any writer, musician, maker, creative practitioner of any genre or experience who would benefit from giving and receiving the nourishment of time and time out.
Price £800. This includes, three nights accommodation and food in Yorkshire, with all activities, plus three x 2 hour zoom sessions and a final in person day with lunch and a fire in South Cumbria
To book a spot
There are eight places on this Imaginarium.
Email us by 11th May with a short EoI of why you’d like to join this Imaginarium.
sehymas [at] gmail.com & katherine [at] zeserson.com
We use these to draw together a diverse group of people. Please also tell us if you would like to be considered for a bursary, or if you feel able to give a donation to support another person’s place.
Imaginariums offer a structured space to support your thinking, writing and experimentation. They rise out of my own creative practice and respond to other artforms and across genres in their aim to widen, stimulate and flex our imaginations. The creative sessions are reciprocal, sparking off what I am reading, writing and thinking and what participants are. No two sessions or programmes are the same, as they depend on how the projects of all involved chime with each other. This is what I love about them. A Writer’s Imaginarium is a community in which to share live ideas, processes and questions that feel current, of the moment.
To riff off what Richard Powers wrote in The Overstory: ‘liking and not liking [are] the rod and staff of commodity culture’: Imaginarums are not about writer feedback and creative criticism. They are places of incubation, a quiet resistance to rushing towards an end product, while holding a sense of momentum towards something, be that a particular form or aspiration for the completion of a piece of work.
Imaginarum Change is a six month online programme based on the classic format of working around a project, with the added focus on writing as change-maker. Info here
Imaginarum Solo is for those of you who’d rather work alone at your own pace. It’s a pdf with guided provocations in online audio recordings. More info here
Imaginarum Half and Half is a short, intensive burst of inspiration, working across two sessions with interim provocations and play. Info here
Imaginarium by Not Writing is a nontutored month-long laboratory into the art of writing without writing*. Provocations and inspirations are sent to you through a single month, with a blog forum for discussion, and a one to one at a time of your choosing. Even if you are based in the southern hemisphere, the intention is to spread some warm sunshine ease through your writing process. More info here
That is the true magnificence – if you can live in a culture that is so destructive as ours is, one that keeps you down and discouraged and broken-hearted and if you can still sing your song, dance your dance, cook your food and speak your mind, then you’ve won. — Alice Walker
The Spirit of the Imaginarium
Each Imaginarium, whatever its form, explores how writing isn’t necessarily fast acting: either in its creation or in how it is received. Imagining operates on different timescales to our daily work/life, home/office, inside/outside worlds. It resists our consumerist culture and refuses to be commodified. It does not follow expected narratives. Imaginariums relish the joy, struggle and complexity of creation. They share a love of communication, expression, bewilderment, confusion, chaos, disruption and whatever else you unearth. Each Imaginarium is provocative: changing one thing into another, or at least how we see one thing into another (which might be the same thing).
Who might come to a Writer’s Imaginarium?
Any one who is writing, or wants to write, something, short story, novel, creative prose, poetry or something more hybrid, is welcome to participate. You do not need to have much experience of writing , or you could have three novels under your belt. Imaginariums are for the curious; writers who are interested in how they might develop their writing and thinking around writing .
Imaginariums are tailor for those who already have an idea, half-fledged, in scribbles in notebooks, an image lodged in your memory. It needn’t be fully formed or fleshed out, just an itch you want to scratch. I do ask that you commit to all the online group sessions (whilst being aware life happens).
I have an application process to ensure each Imaginarium contains writers of different genres, at similar stages in a project, if not their writing life. So you can learn from each other and how our work, ideas and interests may cross-fertilise. It is an open space in which to discover what can happen where different imaginations meet.
The applications are not looking for any particular style of writing or seeking to impose a qualitative stamp on your work.
What previous participants have to say
A Writer’s Imaginarium was an incredibly powerful structure that enabled me to explore a new creative question with depth, nuance and openness. That Sarah managed to continue and grow an incredibly meaningful creative course during a uniquely challenging time (early pandemic) speaks volumes about her skill and knowledge as a facilitator, and also her integrity and heart. I strongly recommend the Imaginarium course to anyone considering a writing project that looks impossible, that feels overwhelming, or that appears to be hidden from view. Sarah is is a wonderful guide. She will provoke you and support you as you unearth your creative work.
A safe space to be an unsafe writer – to push beyond your comfort zone, write stuff that doesn’t matter, chop it up, turn it round and then realise it’s like nothing you’ve written before, and that that does matter. What it entails – better trusting the innate potency of the intangible to assist with your writing – writing, re-thinking time, colour, shape, ownership, associations, triggers. It allows you to write as your synapses actually fire, more than as society wishes your mind to work. Uncolonised writing.
It made me think about writing in a more physical way.
Such a generous and kind tutor … love your bubblin joyousness and playfulness…so infectious.
It opens up what process is … taking you outside of your usual or imagined self. I wouldn’t say out of your comfort zone because it felt like a very safe and supportive space, but perhaps that, in terms of what you imagine your writing or practice to be.
I liked the inputs and reading you give us and the crazy exercises, not just writing and reading out. A group on imagination has to be imaginative after all
A melting pot of thoughts, discussions, ideas, views and useful writing exercises for all genres.
I found the one-to-one to be invaluable. Talking to someone about it and some of the problems I’m facing with it helped me to see it more clearly and gave me something of a different viewpoint on it, which was good.
This is very different from more conventional writing workshops and might particularly suit people who are not so much wanting very specific writing support but more interested in exploring their own and others’ creative process.
Pulls you out of your writing and into yourself, then pushes you out of yourself and into your writing.
*The Art of Writing without Writing acknowledges its debt to Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon and the ethics of nonviolence and nonseparation.
About my workshop practice
I have been creating spaces in which to think, write and experiment across the community for over thirty years. I draw on my practice as a poet, performer, artistbook maker and collaborator. I devise the sessions from my own writing processes which have resulted in work for print – in books, journals, and artistbooks – multimedia exhibits, dance videos, lyrics, pyrotechnical installations, on stage and radio. I have written books: Host, my first poetry collection, was published by Waterloo Press (2010), and melt came out December 2020. Between the two collections I have also co-written site-specific immersive stories, told through geocaching, augmented reality, micro-print & performance. I also work as a coach, mentor and editor.
My collaborations and interactions with the visual, digital and sound artists, musicians, scientists, writers and makers all play a part in influencing the creative and fluid space of my workshops.
Have a rootle around the website to find out more about me.
How can writers of different genres learn from each other? How might the work, ideas and interests cross-fertilize? What happens in that space where different imaginations meet? Read more about my thinking of the imaginarium here
If you have any questions, then get in touch sehymas [at] gmail [dot] com
Wednesday 16th March, 7-9pm
The Gallery, Storey Institute, Lancaster LA1 1TH.
Using sculptures and prints featured in Catriona Stamp‘s Where Are We Going? exhibition as departure points, this writing workshop will explore what migration means to us and how we’re connected to current and historical migrations. We will explore themes of home, alienation and change.
This is a session for play, investigation, art and imagery, open to all, however experienced you are as a writer and whatever form you usually write in.
Full £10
Concessions £5
To book use the contact form below
Where Are We Going?
Paper sculpture | prints | artistsbooks | film by Catriona Stamp
Featuring new work on human migration alongside a retrospective
The Gallery, Storey Institute, Lancaster LA1 1TH
Fri 4 March – Tues 22 March. Noon – 6pm Monday – Fridays.
Remix the Poet: What song offers poetry
A Poetry and Music workshop with Hymas & Lewis
Saturday 14 November, 10-4pm
The Olive Room, Gregson Centre, Lancaster, LA1 3PY
Turn a poem into a song and back into a poem. Edit with your ears and see how the process impacts your imagining of its potential. In this playful, exploratory workshop we will be using the song form to transform the way you think about writing.
Using a variety of activities, writing and thinking time, discussions, silence and time outdoors, poet Sarah Hymas & musician Steve Lewis will share their practice as collaborators and turn the volume up on your own processes.
We have found that setting poetry to music encourages the light in. Once the words are sung, resonances spark, new phrases are found, and different ways of speaking them emerge. The poem matures. This workshop will offer you alternative ways of editing and give you a fresh confidence in your writing and how you share it.
Attending the workshop includes the option to air the results of the day at the following week’s Spotlight Club in Lancaster.
All writers, of any genre and experience level, are welcome.
My writing has appeared in print, multimedia exhibits, poem films, dance videos, lyrics, pyrotechnical installations, on stage and as an improvised opera. I am a Hawthornden Fellow.
the hispering (BlackSunflowers Press, 2021) melt (Waterloo Press, 2020)
Host (Waterloo Press, 2010)
Multiple art booklets combine poetry, illustration and form to present my newer work in beautiful and intimate ways. My artist’s booklet Lune (2013) was runner-up in the Sabotage Awards (2013) and featured in The Guardian Books Blog as an excellent example of the form.
Audio Walks
Since 2014 I have made multiple site-specific audio walks, commissioned by the National Oceanography Centre, Machester Literature Festival, We Do walking festival, Lancaster Arts and Aberdeen Arts. See more here
I am available for readings, workshops, residencies and commissions, and would bring energy, authenticity and a sprinkle of humour to any event. I’m happy to discuss my fees without obligation on your part.
“I thought your performance of your exquisite and elevated
poems was masterly, magnificent.” “Listening to you and your poems is like listening to music.”
“You are a fantastic performance poet.”
My guiding principle when working with others is to keep myself out of the frame. The work is what is important.
As a coach my aim to enable you to clarify exactly what it is you want and how you can best achieve it.
As a mentor or workshop facilitator my job is to help you write what you want – and in the best way to suit you.
As a producer of live literature events my focus is on creating
engaging, vibrant and inclusive occasions, introducing new writing and writers. I want to share and spread the imaginative reach of performed poetry and prose.
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