I was very sad to hear of the death of William — or Will — Sutherland, who died this month after a long illness. William was my former uncle, but that slightly formal description does not capture his place in our family. He was a gardener, writer, musician, teacher, environmental campaigner and a profoundly practical man: someone who believed that land should be tended, food grown, skills shared, music played and good questions asked. For many years he ran the walled garden at Christon Bank in Northumberland, growing extraordinary vegetables and fruit, and running hugely popular scything and self-sufficiency courses. In later life he returned to the cello, playing with his partner Roz in pubs and at gatherings with friends and family. He could be intense, argumentative and surprising — but he was always engaged with life, other people and the state of the world. As an adult, I came to value a quality in him that is rarer than it should be: he asked what you thought, listened to the answer, and took your interests seriously. I have written a longer tribute, “Ten things I learnt from William Sutherland”, about his love of the land, his belief in learning by doing, the importance of returning to what we once loved, and the need to leave something living behind us. Rest in peace, William. #InMemoriam #CreativeLiving #Northumberland #Gardening #SelfSufficiency #Music #ClimateChange

I travelled in my small car — a Toyota iQ I call ‘Brains’, after the bespectacled Thunderbirds character — to a writer’s cabin in Wales partly because I wanted to write, and partly because it gave me an excuse to visit my friend Julia Forster, the novelist and writing coach who runs it with her husband. They have built the cabin at the far end of their property with a rare understanding of what a writer needs: privacy, quiet, warmth and the reassuring sense of being properly looked after while being left alone. It sits apart from the main house, with the valley and weather beyond its windows, offering the kind of solitude in which you can work for hours, or stare into space without feeling that you ought to be doing anything more useful. I went with a manuscript, books, running clothes and more than a little unfinished business from ordinary life. I came away having learnt five things: that writing often continues when we stop forcing it; that reading other writers changes the way we attend to people and the world; that walking restores proportion; that rhythm matters more than rigid discipline; and that solitude is most valuable when it enables us to return more fully to other people.

When something goes wrong at work, the instinct can be to find the person responsible. Yet blame often makes organisations less intelligent: people protect themselves, uncertainty goes unspoken, and vital information stops travelling. Accountability matters. But it works best when people feel safe enough to tell the truth about what has happened. Research on psychological safety suggests that speaking up, asking for help and acknowledging mistakes are essential to learning. Recent evidence also suggests that safety is most powerful when it is paired with a shared commitment to solve problems together. So, in difficult meetings, perhaps we can pause before asking, “Whose fault is this?” and ask instead: “What has happened?” “What are we missing?” “What does this situation require of us now?” This does not mean avoiding responsibility or pretending mistakes do not matter. It means separating inquiry from prosecution, so that problems become material for collective action. Creative leaders can treat policies, projects and processes as drafts: serious enough to implement properly, but always open to evidence, revision and repair. My new article explores how we can create a pathway out of blame, and towards curiosity, candour and practical change.

I’ve been thinking about what creative writing might have to teach us about leadership. When something goes wrong at work, we tend to construct a story very quickly: someone is being difficult, they haven’t done their job properly, they don’t understand, they aren’t listening. Sometimes that story may be right, but it is still a story told from where we happen to be standing. Creative writers are used to doing something different: leaving their own position for a while and trying to imagine the world from somebody else’s. In this new piece, I explore whether that simple practice might help leaders too. What happens if, before a difficult meeting or an angry reply, we spend five minutes writing the other person’s version of events? It doesn’t mean abandoning judgement or accountability. It means making our judgement a little more complicated, curious and humane. Perhaps good leadership sometimes begins by recognising that the story in our own head isn’t necessarily the only story in the room.

I spent a day recently at Tate Modern with Frida Kahlo, Tracey Emin and Ana Mendieta, or at least that was how it began to feel. Kahlo made me think about the different selves we carry around with us, and the stories we tell about who we are. Emin made me look again at the ordinary, messy materials of a life — beds, bodies, love, illness, memory — and how these can become the stuff of art. But it was Ana Mendieta who stayed with me most. Her work seemed to lead me away from the self altogether, towards earth, leaves, trees, water, fire and the strange comfort of remembering that we are part of something much larger than ourselves. I went to Tate Modern to look at art and came away thinking about how to live. I've written about five things these three extraordinary artists taught me about creative living, and why creativity might sometimes be less about making more things than seeing more deeply what is already here. Find the blog here,

Research is frightening because, if it’s genuinely research, you don’t already know the answer. Co-leading Creative Writing Together, our £1m+ AHRC-funded research project, is already teaching me a great deal — not only about research and creative writing, but about leadership. I’ve written about four lessons I’m beginning to learn: 1. Make it safe not to know. Psychological safety isn’t the opposite of rigour. I’m increasingly convinced it’s one of the conditions of rigour. 2. Choose people who know things you don’t. Good leadership isn’t about being the cleverest person in the room. It’s about bringing different kinds of expertise into genuine conversation. 3. Create enough structure for discovery. We need plans, ethics, milestones and accountability — but also enough freedom for research to surprise us. 4. Don’t be frightened of disagreement. Challenge isn’t necessarily obstruction. Sometimes disagreement contains exactly the information a project needs. I’ve been learning these things from a wonderful interdisciplinary team as we develop creative-writing workshops bringing together children, parents, teachers and communities. We’re still near the beginning, which is rather the point. If we already knew exactly what we were going to discover, there wouldn’t be much point in doing the research. Perhaps creative writing, research and creative leadership have this in common: you create the conditions, begin the journey, and leave enough space to be surprised by where you arrive. New piece on my website: #CreativeLeadership #CreativeWritingTogether #PsychologicalSafety #Leadership #Research #CreativeWriting #Education #ActionResearch #HigherEducation #Collaboration

What can creative writing teach us about leadership? Quite a lot, I think. I’ve spent many years teaching and researching creative writing, and more recently leading people, projects and teams. Increasingly, I’ve noticed that some of the principles that make a creative writing workshop flourish also make for better leadership. I’ve brought four of them together in this new piece: 1. Create the conditions — don’t try to control the outcome. 2. Make it safe for people to be wrong. 3. Listen like a writer. 4. Learn to redraft. For me, the interesting shift is from thinking of a leader as the person who has the best ideas to thinking of leadership as creating the conditions in which other people can have good ideas, speak honestly, take intelligent risks and flourish. Creative writing has taught me a surprising amount about how we might do that. I’ve included some practical ideas that leaders can try, alongside research on creativity, psychological safety and organisational learning. I’d be particularly interested to hear from people working in schools, universities, charities and other organisations: what helps people feel able to think creatively where you work? Four Things Creative Writing Has Taught Me About Great Leadership:

What can a broken glass table, a dismantled piano and Philip Glass's music teach us about creativity? In this reflection on Tao of Glass, Phelim McDermott's remarkable new theatrical memoir, I explore seven lessons I took away from an evening that was as much about memory as music. McDermott's blend of storytelling, philosophy, puppetry and Glass's compositions prompted me to reflect on my own lifelong relationship with the composer's work, from discovering Koyaanisqatsi and Glassworks as a student to cycling through London's extraordinary summer of 2026 with Glass's music in my ears. Along the way, I consider unfinished artistic projects, Japanese kintsugi, the power of theatre to transform everyday objects, and why certain works of art continue to change their meaning throughout our lives.

I've just published a new blog reflecting on a stimulating day at the Creative Writing and Mental Health conference at the University of Warwick. It turned into something more personal than I'd expected. Returning to Warwick brought back vivid memories of my PGCE year in 1990, when I cycled each day from Coventry to my teaching placements. Those journeys, and the classrooms I arrived in, were where I really learnt how to teach. Thirty-six years later, I returned to present research from our AHRC-funded Creative Writing Together project, exploring how creative writing can strengthen wellbeing, reflective thinking and relationships within schools and communities. The conference brought together an inspiring mix of novelists, poets, psychologists, therapists and educators. What struck me most was the shared belief that creative writing is about far more than self-expression. At its best, it helps us inhabit other perspectives, develop empathy, shape difficult experiences into meaningful narratives and deepen our understanding of ourselves and others. The day also prompted me to think more critically about the relationship between literary craft and wellbeing, and about the ethical responsibilities involved when creative writing engages with trauma. In the blog, I reflect on seven ideas I took away from the conference, drawing on presentations by Nathan Filer, Mark Pearson, Yang Hao and others, alongside my own work on creative writing pedagogy. I hope it will be of interest to teachers, writers, therapists, researchers and anyone curious about how storytelling can enrich both education and our understanding of what it means to be human. I'd love to know what you think.

In this episode of the Mindful Learning Podcast, I speak with English teacher and researcher Sabina Miah about GCSE English, oracy, creativity, workload, and what is happening inside English classrooms today. Sabina trained on the PGCE English programme at Goldsmiths and is now researching the impact of GCSE English Language reforms on teachers’ pedagogy and classroom practice. Together we explore the disappearance of coursework, the marginalisation of spoken language, the rise of “technique spotting”, silent classrooms, teacher exhaustion, and what all this means for young people. Sabina speaks candidly about the pressures facing teachers today, describing how she developed a “teacher autopilot” simply to survive the workload, while still finding meaning in “those little interactions with the students”. We discuss whether English teaching has become too formulaic, why oracy matters for democracy and social mobility, and how many classrooms have become increasingly compliance-driven. At the same time, the conversation is hopeful. We explore how English could once again become a creative, dialogic subject rooted in debate, drama, discussion, empathy, media literacy, and genuine human expression. This podcast will resonate with teachers, parents, policymakers, students, and anyone interested in the future of education.

Goldsmiths is recruiting an Interim Head of Initial Teacher Education. This is an exciting opportunity to join one of the UK's most creative and research-rich teacher education communities, helping lead our highly regarded PGCE programmes and shape the next generation of teachers. The advert for the role is here,

Recently I spent over a week visiting universities in southeastern China, travelling through Fuzhou and Xiamen promoting Goldsmiths and exploring new educational partnerships. What I encountered challenged many of my assumptions about contemporary China. This was a country that felt simultaneously ancient and futuristic: bullet trains travelling at over 250 kilometres per hour, QR codes governing everyday life, giant digital infrastructures, but also temples filled with incense, banyan shaded parks, Confucian traditions of hospitality and colonial era streets overlooking the Taiwan Strait. I reflect on the extraordinary communal culture around food, the sheer scale of Chinese universities, the rise of China’s own postgraduate sector, and the way figures such as Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Nixon and Kissinger still haunt the political and historical imagination in very different ways from the West. I also explore how China’s technological self sufficiency, from WeChat to digital payments, creates a society that is both incredibly efficient and deeply distinctive from Europe or America. Along the way, I found myself thinking about great travel writers such as Colin Thubron and Peter Hessler, and how travel changes not just our understanding of another country, but of our own.

This blog explores why Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia feels like such an important play for our moment. Ostensibly a legal drama about a judge whose son is accused of rape, the play becomes a powerful meditation on middle class family life, emotional labour, modern masculinity and the hidden pressures faced by professional women. Drawing on Rosamund Pike’s extraordinary performance as Judge Jessica Parks, the blog reflects on the contradictions at the heart of contemporary liberal family life. Jessica is professionally authoritative, intellectually formidable and morally serious, yet privately overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood, marriage and emotional responsibility. The blog examines how the play exposes the unequal burdens still placed upon women, even within supposedly progressive households. It also considers the play’s exploration of boys, pornography, internet culture and the rise of the manosphere, asking how young men are shaped by online misogyny when fathers remain emotionally distant and mothers are stretched to breaking point. The gradual disintegration of the family home on stage becomes a metaphor for the emotional fragility beneath polished middle class success. Combining personal reflection, cultural criticism and close attention to the production’s staging and themes, the blog argues that Inter Alia is not simply about rape culture or the legal system. It is about exhaustion, guilt, intimacy and the emotional cost of trying to “have it all” in contemporary Britain. The piece will particularly resonate with parents, teachers, therapists, academics and anyone interested in feminism, theatre and modern relationships.

Step into Wonderland with a fresh, interactive approach to Lewis Carroll’s classic novels. Lewis Carroll’s Alice Novels: The Study Guide Edition combines the complete texts of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass with commentary, creative activities, teaching ideas and discussion questions designed to deepen readers’ understanding and enjoyment. Rather than simply summarising the stories, the book explores themes such as identity, dreams, nonsense, childhood, power and imagination, encouraging readers to think critically and creatively about Carroll’s strange and enduring worlds. Ideal for students, teachers, trainee teachers and lovers of children’s literature.

Goldsmiths, University of London is currently advertising for a new Head of Initial Teacher Education, and I genuinely believe it is one of the most exciting leadership opportunities in teacher education at the moment. Goldsmiths has played a major role in educating the nation’s teachers since the early 1900s and has built a longstanding reputation for excellence, creativity and innovation in teacher education. Our PGCE programmes are distinctive because they combine rigorous academic study with reflective, inclusive and imaginative approaches to teaching and learning. In this blog, I outline five reasons why this role offers such a special opportunity. These include the chance to work within a university known internationally for creativity and critical thinking; to lead a rich portfolio of Primary and Secondary PGCE programmes; to collaborate with outstanding colleagues and highly motivated students; to shape the future direction of Initial Teacher Education during a period of national change; and to do so within a permanent part-time role that allows space for research, writing and wider professional practice. Goldsmiths offers PGCE programmes across subjects including English, Drama, Mathematics, Media, Science, Art and Design, Modern Languages and Primary Education, all underpinned by a strong commitment to social justice, creativity and educational excellence. The closing date is 28th May 2026, so do apply soon if you are interested in joining a vibrant and forward-looking educational community.

Really excited to share my latest blog about the launch of the AHRC-funded Creative Writing Together project at York St John University. Last week, in early May 2026, our brilliant interdisciplinary team gathered for the first major kickoff meeting, bringing together creative writers, educators, psychologists, researchers and digital innovators to explore how creative writing can support reflective functioning, empathy, wellbeing and social change. In the blog, I reflect on seven key things I learned from our first week together, including why creative writing projects are built through relationships, how writing from another perspective can transform empathy, the continuing power of free writing, why ethical AI needs principles rather than panic, and how strong structures make creative freedom possible. It was genuinely inspiring to work alongside colleagues including Tom Dobson, Samia Rahman, Dan Ingram-Brown, Paige Davis, Sam Clarke, Jane Collins, Rachel Seiffert and many others as we begin what feels like a deeply important and hopeful project. Creative writing is not ornamental. It helps people connect, reflect and imagine differently. Read the full blog here: If you’re reading this on Instagram, please paste the link into your browser to access the full article.

I’ve just finished reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, and it’s stayed with me in a way very few novels do. What begins almost like a Jane Austen comedy of manners, a letter between families trying to arrange a match, becomes something far more expansive and unsettling. This is a novel about love, yes, but also about class, migration, identity, and the strange loneliness of living between worlds. Sunny, trapped between Indian privilege and American aspiration, is brilliantly drawn. Sonia, a gifted writer hemmed in by expectation, is just as compelling. But what really surprised me was Babita, Sunny’s monstrous, snobbish, controlling mother, who somehow becomes one of the most sympathetic figures in the book. Desai achieves something remarkable there. The novel moves across Delhi, Goa, New York and beyond, but never feels showy. It feels lived. There is humour, darkness, exploitation, tenderness, and a real sense of how people get trapped in the lives they inherit. For all its sophistication, it’s also deeply readable. There’s a real “will they, won’t they” energy running through it, even as it tackles much bigger questions. One of the most accomplished novels I’ve read in years.

I met Tobias Hill in 1999, in a London literary world that felt alive, exploratory, not yet fully digitised. Very different from now in 2026. We stood outside a sealed Underground entrance in Kentish Town, a space that had quietly taken on another life, hidden, ambiguous, charged. Tobias was drawn to it, not for spectacle, but because he was always interested in what lay beneath. That sense of him has stayed with me. In this blog, I reflect on five things his writing taught me, about mystery, the underground, humanity, metaphor, and the unconscious. Hill’s work moves through cities, objects, and histories with extraordinary precision, always searching for meaning within the specific. I’ve also included a digitally generated image of Tobias, a symbolic portrait rather than a literal one. I suspect, slightly ironically, that the Tobias I knew would have found it amusing. He wasn’t po-faced about art or writing, quite the opposite, he was playful, curious, alive to odd juxtapositions. I think he would have laughed, at least a bit. I offer it in that same spirit of playfulness he brought to his work, while also trying to gesture towards something else he captured so well, the uncanny sense that the familiar world is always on the edge of becoming strange. For me, the image became a way of thinking about Tobias as a kind of time traveller, still moving through the underground spaces he wrote about, still connecting with us through his work. He touched many lives, and continues to do so. I really miss him, even though I did not know him that well; I miss his literary presence in particular. This piece is an attempt to honour his humanity and work. Read the full blog here:

I’m delighted to be recruiting for two roles on our AHRC funded Creative Writing Together project at Goldsmiths, University of London. The project explores how creative writing can support reflection, wellbeing, and dialogue across generations, working with schools, community groups, and writers across London. We are looking for a Research Assistant (.5 FTE) and a Short Courses and Training Officer (.2 FTE) to join the team from 1 May 2026 to 30 April 2029. Full details, including the job descriptions, are now available on my blog. If you are interested, please send a formal letter of application and CV to me, Dr Francis Gilbert at [email protected] by Thursday 25 March at 4pm. Interviews will take place 31 March, either online or in person at Goldsmiths, and please state your availability for interview in your application. A formal advert will appear on the Goldsmiths website shortly, but I am sharing details early in case colleagues, doctoral researchers, teachers, writers, or community practitioners may be interested. Do take a look at the blog post and feel free to share it with anyone who might be a good fit.

As part of the British Library's Learning Skills Research Network, Debbie Bogard and I co-led an online Learning and Skills Research Network session exploring research methods and data collection in Further Education. At first I joked that research methods might not be the most thrilling topic. Yet the discussion quickly showed the opposite. When research begins with real classrooms, real teachers, and real learners, it becomes deeply engaging. The session centred on a simple but powerful idea. Small scale practitioner research can generate profound insight. FE classrooms are rich research sites where teachers already observe patterns, dilemmas, and possibilities every day. Research is not something distant or purely academic. It begins with curiosity about practice. Five themes emerged strongly. First, FE classrooms contain valuable knowledge worth studying. Second, the research question matters more than the method. Third, teacher voice is not decoration but a form of data that reveals how systems actually operate. Fourth, ethics sit at the centre of practitioner research because education is fundamentally relational. Finally, research can be empowering. In systems shaped by accountability pressures, inquiry allows teachers to step back, reflect, and understand their work more deeply. The workshop reminded us that practitioner research is not about grand projects. It is about paying attention to practice and learning from it together.

I am delighted to share that Professor Tom Dobson and I, working with an exceptional interdisciplinary team, have secured close to £1 million in funding for a three year research project, Creative Writing Together. This major award supports an ambitious investigation into how creative writing can strengthen relationships between children, parents, teachers and communities, and enhance wellbeing across educational settings. At a time when schools and families are facing rising mental health challenges, increasing absence and deepening inequalities, we are asking a simple but powerful question. What if creative writing were treated not as an optional enrichment activity, but as a relational practice that helps people understand themselves and one another more deeply? The project centres on the concept of reflective functioning, the capacity to make sense of behaviour in terms of thoughts, feelings and intentions. Strong reflective functioning is associated with secure attachment, improved relationships and emotional regulation. Yet creative writing has rarely been studied as a preventative, community based approach to developing these capacities. Over three years, we will run eight week programmes in schools and community centres in London and York, bringing families and teachers together to write collaboratively. Combining action research, psychological measures and close analysis of participants’ writing, we aim to generate robust evidence and practical resources that can inform policy and practice. Creative Writing Together positions writing as a shared, transformative act. In a fragmented educational landscape, it offers a hopeful vision of creativity as connection.

I recently watched Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, and I cannot stop thinking about it. It is a film that makes you laugh, then makes you question the laughter. In a cinema full of people, there were audible laughs during scenes of murder, not because they were comic in any simple way, but because they were staged with such grim, bureaucratic practicality. The premise is brutally simple. A laid-off paper expert decides to kill his rivals for a job so he can protect his family. What unfolds is not just a thriller, but a devastating portrait of masculinity under neoliberal pressure. When a man’s worth is fused with his wage, unemployment feels like erasure. Love becomes panic. Protection becomes predation. What shocked me most was not the violence, but how easily the system absorbs it. The film suggests that modern corporate life already trains us to think in terms of targets, elimination, competition, survival. If Oldboy was about imprisonment as destiny, No Other Choice is about employment as destiny. It is disturbing, funny, precise, and deeply humane. A film about men, family, and what happens when the system leaves you believing there is no other choice.

How can creative research help young people become agents of environmental change? This post highlights a chapter I co-authored with Anna Stewart in the edited collection Ecologies in Practice and Learning: Arts Interventions in the Earth Crisis. The book brings together arts educators, researchers and practitioners exploring how learning, creativity and ecological action intersect in a time of environmental crisis. Our chapter draws on the Parklife project, where young people aged eleven to fourteen became co-researchers into a local park. Using poetry, art, film, photography and surveys, they explored safety, ecology and belonging, and presented their findings directly to decision-makers. The result was real change on the ground. The chapter argues for creative, participatory research as a powerful tool for environmental education and democratic engagement, and for parks as classrooms without walls. You can read and download the full article via my website.

What happens when we stop seeing young people as a problem in parks, and instead invite them to become researchers, artists and agents of change? This blog, and the chapter it draws on, grows out of the Parklife project, a collaboration between university students, school pupils and local communities. It sets out five reasons why supporting young people to research their local parks matters now. Using creative and participatory methods such as poetry, visual art, film and surveys, the project showed what becomes possible when young people’s insights are taken seriously. Pupils aged eleven to fourteen became co-researchers rather than passive participants. They explored questions of safety, ecology, care and belonging, and presented their findings directly to councillors and park managers. The outcome was tangible change, including improved lighting, better litter management and new community facilities. The research also speaks to wider debates about education, environment and democracy. It challenges deficit narratives about youth, demonstrates the policy impact of creative research, and reimagines parks as classrooms without walls. The article is available open access via the Goldsmiths research repository and is published as a chapter in Ecologies in Practice and Learning: Arts Interventions in the Earth Crisis, situating Parklife within international conversations about socially engaged research and environmental futures. You can read the full copyright-free article here: Springer book: Goldsmiths repository:

St Mary’s Churchyard in Walthamstow is more than a restored historic site. It is a living commons, a place where gardening, conversation, memory, and creativity quietly intertwine. On a January afternoon, we gathered there with students from the MA Creative Writing and Education at Goldsmiths for a community writing session that showed just how powerful local, place-based creative work can be. Led by two MA students, Sophie and Priyanka, the session moved fluidly between sensory attention and playful experimentation. Smell, wind, weather, laughter, discomfort, poetry, and the natural world all became entry points into writing that felt inclusive, serious, and alive. Volunteers and students wrote side by side, discovering that creative confidence grows not through expertise but through permission, attention, and shared experience. What emerged was a practical, replicable model for community creative writing. One that does not demand performance, prizes curiosity over polish, and allows ecological awareness to arise through voice rather than instruction. This post reflects on six key practices from the session, offering ideas for anyone interested in engaging local communities through creative writing, mindfulness, and place.