Earlier this year I was looking forward to a new Dark Angels course. The plan was I’d run it with the artist Jenni Wallace and we’d explore the connections between visual and verbal art at a country house in Sussex called Tilton.

Neil Baker kindly asked me to write for the Dark Angels’ blog to introduce my book, to explain why I wrote it and what the process meant to me.

Read this dispatch from the writer Becca Magnus, a great and true friend of Dark Angels, as she brilliantly chronicles the moment.

‘Should have been’ are three words I don’t find myself using very often. Being of an optimistic nature, and someone who aims to see setbacks as opportunities for new ideas, I try not to fall prey to regret.

I see writing as a good antidote to the Coronavirus situation. Here we are, in not such splendid isolation, having to change the way we live.

Front lines are all on our minds right now. I think of poetry as language’s front line, the place where things can at once be at their most considered and their most intense, raw, immediate.

On just about every Dark Angels workshop, we talk about place. As a thing or a notion that writers ought to tap into or evoke.

Paying a visit to Material, an essay by the writer Lucy Corin.

First, as writers who attempt to earn our livings in the commercial world, we often put ourselves into straitjackets. As if there were irreconcilable differences between, say, writing a website and writing a novel.

At Dark Angels residential courses, we sometimes think of our writing exercises as ‘experiments’: to try things out together, drawing on new ideas in a safe and supportive environment.

Go Deep. If you haven’t yet joined us on a Dark Angels writing experience, we can promise you our courses will help you to become a better writer.

In which John Simmons and Richard Pelletier chat about a new novel from John, staying productive as a writer, social media, and reading.

Having recovered from a boisterous and wonderous gathering of Dark Angels at Hawkwood College, Craig Watson and Therese Kieran discuss the lighter side…

A few short days ago, US Dark Angel Richard Pelletier and Ted Leonhardt, held an event at Folio. It's a lovely private library, perfect to discuss some great topics.

This past October saw the first ever Dark Angels workshop held in America.

Co-founder Stuart Delves gets Craig Watson to deliver the big reveal. How a piece of well-crafted business writing led him to Dark Angels and a set of experiences ('the people, the places, the playing with words') that have become one of his life's highlights.

Rowena Roberts and cofounder John Simmons talk language and connection, books, storytelling, and what it means to call yourself a writer.

Dark Angels founder John Simmons has just published his second novel, Spanish Crossings, set during the Spanish Civil War. This began as a story written in Spain on a Dark Angels course in 2014.