Join artist, writer, fossil hunter, and Port of London Authority (PLA) licensed mudlark J. R. Carpenter with local Essex based artist Sylak Ravenspine for an intertidal walking and writing workshop in the Thames Estuary. As we move between high and low tide, mud flats and marshland, fresh and salt water, we will navigate the creative space between noticing and noting, where writing happens.

Tickets to be released soon. £25 per person.

See the full Essex Writers Programme here.

J.R. Carpenter will share her journey around her new book p a u s e. which is out now. In p a u s e. J. R. turns the simple act of going for a walk into a radical practice of attention. Written over the course of a year of daily encounters with kisiskâciwanisîpiy (the North Saskatchewan River) as it runs through amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). Written in short, breath-like fragments, p a u s e. drifts between field note, love poem, and land acknowledgement, refusing to settle as a genre. Fossils, wildfire haze, trumpeter swans, city traffic, and pandemic loneliness all pass through its pages, as the poem keeps returning to one insistent question: what happens when we treat noticing as a form of care and listening as a way of giving something back?

Sylak Ravenspine Sylak Ravenspine is an Essex-based eco-artist whose practice is rooted in the local landscape. Drawing deep inspiration from the tidal marshes and eroding coastlines of Essex, Sylak forages material from the area, imparting a sense of fragility, ecological stewardship, and renewal into everything he creates. His ‘Inks of Essex’ provide a fluid representation of the environment, while his work on recording soil structures redefines field data as an artform. Sylak’s work responds to the land with an intentional surrender to natural cycles that challenges traditional notions of permanence and control in art.