Talks

Joanne has been delivering talks and workshops on creative writing for over a decade – everything from digital international conferences with 300 attendees to small focus-groups of school and university students. She recently founded The Writing Set, a company that runs creative writing courses and literary events in Wiltshire and London.

Her subject specialisms include historical fiction, art in literature, creative collaborations, and practical approaches to writing novels, short stories and poems, from the initial idea to the final edit.

If you are interested in engaging Joanne to deliver a talk or workshop, please get in touch on the CONTACT page.

Some highlights of past events:

“I see a voice”: Inventing a Tudor Portrait – November 2023 – Seventeen Gallery, London, UK

In collaboration with artist Curtis Holder, Joanne is currently “creating” the imaginary Tudor portrait miniature at the heart of her debut novel, The Girl in the Locket. In this talk, she invited the audience to consider what’s at stake when artists and novelists intervene in the archives. Why might we choose to invent one of the lost Tudors – those whose faces we almost never see on art gallery walls?

“Peninsula”: Recollections of Childhood in Aberdaron – June 2023 – The Llŷn Peninsula, UK

This was a talk about ferocious goats and overturned boats, free verse and escaped pigs, waves and words. Having grown up between a town in Southern England and a small farm in North Wales, Joanne Rush discussed her first poetry chapbook, Peninsula, which explores the joy of small things, and the meaning of home.

“The Magic of Paintings in Historical Fiction” – November 2022 – Exeter Library, UK

How do authors recreate the lost past? Why are so many historical novels dripping with wet paint? To answer these questions, Joanne gave a whistle-stop tour of key portraits in historical fiction. At the end, she took a detour into the archives, looking for traces of the Londoners who are hardest to find: women, the working classes, and people from minority cultures. What pictures of themselves did they see? And if no authentic portraits survive, can a novelist use her imagination?

“Imagining Lost Stories: Invisible Tudors in Historical Fiction” – October 2022 – Scotland, UK

Joanne invited audiences behind the scenes of her new novel, The Girl in the Locket, to explore the pictures and manuscripts that inspired two key characters: an Irish brother and sister who worked for Queen Elizabeth I.

“Entering the NFT Art Space” – October 2022 – OxBAT Conference, Magdalen College, Oxford, UK

Chrysalis is a project that brings poetry, code and paint together in a series of eco-conscious, media-rich Web3 artworks. With collaborators Nigel Fryatt and Saffron Murray Browne, Joanne explained the challenges and possibilities of making art on the blockchain.

“Tickle Talks” – November 2021–June 2022 – Weekly podcast with an international audience

A weekly discussion of the poetry and prose featured in each new issue of The Tickle, an international arts and literature magazine.

“Ghosts and Ink: A Writer’s Life” – September 2020 – Shanghai University, China

Commissioned as part of Shanghai University’s annual Creative Writing Conference, this talk drew on Joanne’s own experience of becoming a novelist. How do ideas get shaped into books? What can we learn from writing courses? Is technique more important than inspiration?