I looked out of the window, thinking how universal an opener it was to ask strangers where they had come from. The Queen famously started conversations this way, although my son said South London gangsters often asked where you were from, too, before advising you to stick to your own postcode.

We were calling this a Life Class, except that the group had to describe the various positions we asked our models to strike in words, rather than with pencils or pastels. I reckoned writers had as much to learn working from a life model as artists did. They too should sit in circles studying the human form, both naked and clothed, striking differe

And soulful investigations can make for dull writing; emotions are not only hard to describe but boring to read about when isolated from the other experiences of life because, in fact, they never are isolated from those things. Rachel Cusk’s description of a tooth extraction in Aftermath is also about extracting herself from a marriage. The nurse h

They may have come here to get away from other people. All the same, it was interesting, and poignant, to see how everyone arrived on the first day ready to reinvent themselves and how, by midweek, all the original character traits were reasserted, for better or worse. People settled into groups – the popular ones, the quiet ones, the odd troublema

For that morning’s exercise each person had to draw a floorpan of their childhood home, then swap it with the person sitting next to them who would mark a cross in one of the rooms. The assignment came in two parts: first to describe an object in that room. Then to use that description to lead into a piece of writing about a person or an event conn

there was a sense of people arriving at a house party to which not enough men had been invited.

Perhaps all of us walk among ghosts, along haunted streets. Oxford Street and Piccadilly teem with unseen millions. We brush past Virginia Woolf in Russell Square and Charles Dickens on the Strand. We glimpse shadowy figures at the end of ancient alleyways. We’re connected with the past and future – but we can’t always make sense of the connections

‘How are you?’ he asked. We were sitting in a ‘break-out’ area, in deep nourishing sofas that are intended to cradle fragile personalities. People come here to make difficult phone calls, and sometimes to get fired. ‘I’m well, thanks.’ ‘But how are you really?’ he said, looking at me so intently that I found tears pricking my eyes. I wondered if I

For the poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie, ‘wild’ is a word like ‘soul’. ‘Such a thing may not exist, but we want it, and we know what we mean when we talk about it.’