News and updates
A history of Alice’s residency at Wytham Woods
2023
3 December 2023: our final Wytham Writing Club. In 2024 Alice will be handing this event over to the new Writer in Residence, Penny Boxall.
12 November 2023: this session was about the changing seasons. We wrote outside and thought about colours, plants and animals, and reflected on how the seasons can be a metaphor for the passing of our own lives.
22 October 2023: today’s Writing Club was all about considering our readers and audiences, thinking about who will read our writing, and how we want them to feel when they get to the end.
8 October 2023: following on from our session on dialogue, today we thought about point of view and voice in our writing.
24 September 2023: today’s Wytham Writing Club (session 8) was a skills session focusing on writing dialogue.
11 September 2023: Alice organised an online climate panel and writing workshop for those wanting to use fiction to address the topic of climate change.
3 September 2023: the 7th Wytham Writing Club, at which we talked about nature and climate writing.
13 August 2023: Alice’ annual Pick Your Own Path project took place today, the group each put together their own story structure.
30 July 2023: Wytham Writing Club met for the 6th time, and talked about using the woods as a setting.
2 July 2023: our fifth Wytham Writing Club meeting, at which we talked about how to craft beautiful descriptions.
18 June 2023: the Wytham Book Group met in the morning and walked through the woods while discussing recommended reads. This was the last session run by Alice, with the new Writer in Residence taking over in the autumn.
4 June 2023: the fourth Wytham Writing Club, at which we discussed planning and plotting (using string!).
21 May 2023: Wytham Book Group met in the afternoon to discuss books on the theme of nature and climate writing.
7 May 2023: our third Writing Club event, this time outdoors in the sunshine! Our theme was ‘journey’.
24 April 2023: with her Wytham anthology in mind, along with all she has learnt while Writer in Residence, Alice delivered a talk on Fact vs Fiction at Wolfson College, Oxford.
23 April 2023: our second Wytham Writing Club. Our theme for today was ‘purpose’.
26 March 2023: the first meeting of the new Wytham Woods Writing Club! We discussed our intentions and motivation for writing and for coming to Wytham to do this, we had two brief writing sessions outside, and a couple of people shared what they had written.
12 March 2023: we’re onto Book Group number 8! This one, as for the last couple of times, took a ‘walking’ format, and ended with a cup of tea and biscuits at the Chalet.
29 January 2023: our first event of the new year! The seventh nature/climate writing book club with Alice Little and Kim Polgreen.
2022
29 November 2022: Alice reflected on the book club and gave two examples of nature writing in fiction in a blog post, published on the Wytham Woods website.
20 November 2022: the sixth nature/climate writing book club. The list of books mentioned continues to grow on the same page.
25 September 2022: the fifth nature/climate writing book club.
July-September 2022: Alice stayed overnight at the Chalet in Wytham several times - making literal the ‘in residence’ part of her role!
31 July 2022: fourth in our series of nature/climate writing book clubs.
27 June 2022: Alice joined Wytham’s Youth Educator, Kim Polgreen, to run a workshop for teachers on Writing, Teenagers, and Eco-Anxiety.
26 June 2022: our third nature/climate writing book club.
15 May 2022: a second nature/climate writing book club, with Kim Polgreen. The books discussed at all our book clubs are listed together here.
8 April 2022: Alice ran a creative writing masterclass for Meeting Minds, Oxford University’s alumni festival. The topic was how to write meaningfully about the climate emergency (in fiction) without depressing your reader! Alice ran through a series of quick-fire exercises to get brains firing and words flowing.
6 March 2022: together with Wytham’s Youth Educator, Kim Polgreen, Alice joined participants round the campfire for a nature/climate book club - [read about it here(https://oxfordearthacademy.org/blogs/2022/3/7/book-club-at-wytham-woods).
February-March 2022: Alice took part in the Woodland Trust’s Ancient Tree Inventory Verifier Training.
2021
6 December 2021: Alice’s last event of 2021, a zoom writing workshop, used fairy tales as a starting point for inventing new futures for familiar characters.
20 November 2021: our second Writers’ Walk and Tea. Focusing on fiction, Alice read aloud from four paperbacks: Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Sarah Maitland’s Gossip from the Forest, Roald Dahl’s short story ‘The Sound Machine’ in Someone Like You, and Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley.
8 November 2021: our second online workshop of the autumn term. We discussed integrating trees with character, plot and setting.
23 October 2021: our first Writers’ Walk and Tea. You can read the quotations Alice shared here.
14 October 2021: Alice was part of an invited audience at the Anagama Kiln Firing.
4 October 2021: the first in a new series of three Zoom workshops, and the last focused on the Pick Your Own Path project. We discussed endings.
20 September 2021: our fourth Monday evening workshop, which took place on Zoom. We discussed the Pick Your Own Path project.
11 September 2021: our fourth Saturday drop-in workshop at Wytham Woods. This time the activities were pinned on trees in the workshop area.
23 August 2021: our third Monday evening workshop, at which we discussed badger research at Wytham with Tanesha Allen.
14 August 2021: our third Saturday drop-in workshop at Wytham Woods. The activities focused on describing characters, whether trees or people, and what words might be used for both.
29 July 2021: Alice presented a paper at the Oxford University conference, Uprooting the Anthropocene: (re-)centring trees in tree-human relationships. You can read and listen to her talk here.
26 July 2021: our second Monday evening workshop, at which we discussed grasses with scientist Sara Middleton.
17 July 2021: our second Saturday workshop. Alice set out a table of stories set in the wood for participants to read, and set out writing prompts for participants to try. Many brought rugs or borrowed chairs and sat under the trees to do their writing.
28 June 2021: A writing workshop in our specially-created writing circle of tree stumps, in the woods. Special guest, woods conservator Nigel Fisher, told us about his work and the way his role has changed since it was created, to help inform and inspire our writing.
22 June 2021: Alice attended a meeting of the Wytham Committee and discussed her upcoming plans for the residency as well as finding out about what else is happening in the woods.
19 June 2021: our first in-person workshop with Alice, Pick Your Own Path. We used a specially created blank map of the woods to stimulate ideas for what might happen to Hazel on her adventure among the trees.
17 May 2021: Alice reviewed her three winter workshops from earlier in the year.
18 March 2021: Alice ran a creative writing workshop for the staff of Estates Services at the University.
2 March 2021: in the third workshop Alice ran on Zoom, Write Together, participants set goals for their own writing, and then spent time focusing on their own projects before feeding back to the group and setting goals for the next time they sat down to write.
8 February 2021: our second writing workshop of the residency. Alice led a series of exercises, increasingly more in depth, encouraging participants to explore setting, character, and plot, and providing inspiration in the form of videos of Wytham and woodland facts. (You might be interested in this video)
30 January 2021: Alice’s first workshop for Wytham Woods. Taking place on Zoom, participants discussed nature writing today (you might be interested in this article), and how to write fiction that depends on a particular setting.
27 January 2021: Alice took part in the Oxford Climate Club, contributing to a discussion on how to bring the climate emergency into the school curriculum.
14 January 2021: Alice announced her theme for her writing residency: Trees
2020
27 November 2020: Introducing Alice Little as the new Writer in Residence at Wytham Woods
4 September 2020: Alice began her term as Writer in Residence at Wytham Woods.