Eyebrows and Imagination – Rosie Garland joins the Writers' Gym

Award-winning poet, long and short fiction author, performer and vocalist with the March Violets, Rosie Garland talks to Dr Rachel Knightley about curiosity, creative confidence – and taking on the world eyebrows first! She is the author of The Palace of Curiosities (which won the Mslexia Novel Competition and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize), Vixen and The Night Brother, which was described by The Times as “a delight…with shades of Angela Carter.” Her new novel, The Fates (Quercus) is a retelling of the Greek myth of the Fates. Her latest poetry collection, What Girls do in the Dark (Nine Arches Press), was shortlisted for the 2021 Polari Prize. Val McDermid has named her one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK today. In 2018-2019 she was inaugural Writer-in-Residence at The John Rylands Library, Manchester, and in 2023 was made a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

 

 

For a writing workout based on Rosie’s interview with Rachel, scroll down or visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series.

 

Find out more about Rosie at http://www.rosiegarland.com

 

Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at [e-mail]

 

 

Writing Workout based on Rosie’s interview

 

Warm-up: Rachel’s ‘Excuses Bingo’ Grid

 

Make a massive noughts and crosses board on your page. Each square just needs to be to be big enough to write a sentence in. Throw all of the phrases that come up: ‘What if it’s too boring?’ ‘What if it’s too weird?’ ‘I’m not that kind of writer.” ‘X is better than me.’ Whatever your brain might throw at you.

 

Go through them all, and use ‘What if’ to find the positive opposite (spoiler alert: it’s going to be true!). For example, ‘What if it's too weird?’ might have as its positive opposite ‘What if this is the book that saved somebody's life?’

 

Exercise 1: The Craft of Gentleness

 

“I strive to do is show myself the gentleness that I show to other writers. I mean one thing I absolutely love and which feeds and nourishes me is being a mentor for other writers. I come to mentoring with an attitude of acceptance and warm encouragement and cheerleading and something I try to do for myself. It’s sometimes a struggle because of that classic one of like the hardest, the person who's hardest in the world is you on yourself.” Rosie Garland

 

1. Listening

Choose to listen to when the voices of self-criticism come:

 

• If there is a fear, what would it be? If the thing it’s criticising represents a step forward, what if that voice needs your reassurance instead of obeying it?

 

2. Choosing

 

Now you know it isn’t a fact, put the what the voice on your Excuses Bingo grid. Note the time reference (you might just find it flies past the window the same time tomorrow!).

 

Exercise 2: The Art of Randomness

 

“Go and pick up thr