• Email: megan@thewritersgreenhouse.co.uk
• Location: Oxford, United Kingdom
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Hi! I’m Megan and I run The Writers’ Greenhouse: a one-woman business offering creative-writing courses and resources for adults, on all aspects of fiction and poetry, packed with hands-on activities and techniques. All levels are welcome, from complete beginners to established writers.
I’m a published writer and trained teacher with years of experience, so you get organised, fun-filled classes and resources that genuinely help you develop, with real writing practices. Everything I teach, from genre courses to creative processes, rests on thorough research and evidence bases, to give you advice you can trust, not just one writer’s opinion and experience.
I use process learning, because info on its own isn’t that helpful and can even stymie us: it comes alive when we discover and use it through supported processes. This means creative, hands-on resources that give you the tools and confidence to write more and better. It’s inherently multi-level, so whether you’re new or experienced, you’ll expand your skills and feel like you belong. I also use play-theory: we learn better and do more not with stricter discipline and more guilt, but by finding our joy in it.
I run three multi-week courses a year, which you can join in person in Oxford or on Zoom from anywhere. The April–July course alternates between two general fiction courses: Story Elements and Immersive Fiction. The Feb–Mar and Oct–Nov courses rotate between Imaginary Worlds, Starting Points, Meddling with Poetry, Writing in Style, and Time To Write.
August is The Summer of Writing: five one-day creative writing workshops in Oxford on Saturdays in August. I also run occasional online weekend workshops in spring, autumn, and winter. All the workshop topics are chosen by vote, from a long list of some 20+ full-day workshops.
The Evergreen Courses are self-paced digital courses and workshops which you can do from anywhere, any time. They use the same hands-on workshop-style approach as all my teaching: you learn by having fun and doing the activities.
So far, they include The Essentials of Storytelling, 30 Days of Writing, Guided Story Creaton: The Spices, Narrative Drive, Plot Tension Map, and Orientating the Reader: Shifting Between Scenes.
The Writers’ Greenhouse Community gives you ongoing support with your writing, through an affordable online membership: to develop your writing, get advice on tap, and connect with your writing community.
All the live multi-week courses include feedback on your writing. Outside the courses, I also offer feedback and mentoring on excerpts, poems, novels in progress, and completed manuscripts. (This is mostly available October–March.)
I started The Writers’ Greenhouse in 2011, after several years working as an EFL teacher, course designer, and in education marketing, alongside my own writing. I’ve ghostwritten seven novels and pseudonymously published a novel, novellas, and short stories. Under my own name, I’ve published short fiction and poetry in Open, The BFS Journal, Astrologica, New Writing, Haiku Quarterly, Sentinel, the Tanka Journal, Elbow Room, Thema, Wild Words, Words for the Wild, Green Ink Poetry, and with Penteract Press. I've also contributed non-fiction and academic articles to Postmodern Culture, La Négation, and Filament. Across all of these, I’ve written comedy, realism, thrillers, science fiction, magical realism, fantasy, Gothic, formal and free-verse poetry, and literary fiction. I’m currently working on a non-magical fantasy series.
I grew up in South Africa, where I did my BA (Hons) in English Literature, including French and Linguistics, before moving to the UK. I’d already fallen in love with Oxford at 18 on my gap year, moved here to do my Masters in English Literature at the University of Oxford, and made Oxford my forever-home.
As well as writing and teaching, I love greenery, arts and crafts of all kinds, old buildings, slow cooking, spreadsheets and web design, making things beautiful, and helping people.
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