Based in Sheffield, UK – I’m a creative facilitator, writer, maker, and mentor specialising in creative writing arts for healing, liberation, courage and resistance.
I believe everyone can write. That everyone has the right to write. That everyone is inherently and divinely creative. This stuff is in our bones. Inherited from our ancestors. Waiting to be expressed through us.
My workshops, courses and mentoring centre these values, encouraging women/people of colour to discover their own individual and collective voices through joyful and therapeutic creative writing and nature-allied writing arts, therapeutic zine-making and mixed media arts, rest and meditation, nature and healing.
I believe we need to tell our stories, create our own wild archives – because if we don’t tell them, who else will?
If you’d like to have a chat about collaborating please email me at hello@dalkular.com
That’s me, and photos of my Mum and Dad ~ part of Dig Where You Stand Biennial 2024
In 2024, creative projects include:
Black Nature in Residence’s ‘Creative-in-Residence’ for Peak District National Park.
Dig Where You Stand archival justice project: commissioned artist. You can see my work here and here.
Continuing partnership with Centre of Equity and Inclusion’s anti-racist mentoring scheme (designed/facilitated by Dal Kular).
Peaks of Colour’s 2024 writer-in-residence: zine project on nature-allied writing.
Maker of handmade note-books, journals and giant collaborative art books.
Migration Matters Festival 2024: creative workshop about the Partition of India.
My essay on nature and healing published inWild Service: Why Nature Needs You. Edited by Nick Hayes (Bloomsbury).
My work stands on the shoulders of many incredible scholars, mentors, teachers, writers and my ancestors – to whom I am eternally grateful.
A little bit more about me…
From being born and raised in Sheffield to Punjabi/Sikh working class immigrant parents to leaving school at 16 years old with 3 o-levels and being told I could never be a writer – to severe burnout, grief, loss and chronic illnesses – I reconnected with the power of words and creative arts in my late forties as an act of radical healing, as a way to write myself back home, transform my life, and to learn to live well within my limitations.
This journey led to studying for an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (Metanoia Institute) and finally liberating myself from twenty years as a Social Worker. My debut poetry collection (un)interrupted tongues explores this journey towards liberation and healing exploring intersections of race, creativity and nature.
I know creativity has the power to radically heal and transform our lives. Creative projects, mixed-media arts and hand-making journals were a crucial part of my recovery and healing from a traumatic brain injury sustained in summer 2022. When reading and writing were too painful, I cut, stuck and collaged my heart out until slowly-slowly I could face writing again.
Nature and the outdoors continue to be a huge part of my journey too and reflected in my essays. I’m most often found on my tiny allottment or roaming the Peak District in my tiny van – pen in hand – creating my latest archive.
Finally, nothing gives me greater joy than hearing other folks read their words at workshops, share their creativity or sharing how creativity has made a difference to their lives. This is heart work and I’m blessed to do it!