“She shall play such music as was never heard on earth.”
-Sleeping Beauty, The Brothers Grimm
Spring 2026 Pioneer Cohort (Enrollment Open)
I am currently offering a small, free Pioneer Cohort of Making Space for the Muse as part of developing the material into a book.
Dates: February 28, March 21, March 28, April 11
Time: 1–4 PM CST / 2–5 PM EST
Format: Virtual
This cohort is intentionally small and reflective in nature. If you are interested in participating, please contact me directly.
About Making Space for the Muse
Making Space for the Muse is a structured, reflective workshop designed to help poets and writers reconnect with and sustain meaningful engagement in their creative work.
It does not focus on craft or generating poems. Instead, it examines the conditions that support or inhibit your writing practice — bringing them into awareness so you can work with them intentionally.
Over the course of four virtual sessions, you will:
• Identify the conditions that supported your most productive periods
• Identify hidden factors that inhibit forward movement
• Design supportive practices and structures that make sustained creative work possible
Through guided exercises and shared inquiry, you begin to formulate a personal system for removing creative blocks and cultivating ideas — one you can continue to draw upon long after the workshop ends.
In the process, we name the forces that make writing harder — from the small-but-relentless “Logistical Gnats” of daily demands to the louder “Noxious Goblins” of self-doubt — because naming these patterns makes them more manageable.
Drawing on both my life as a poet and my work in leadership development and consulting, the workshop blends reflective inquiry, practical structure, and imaginative framing. We step back and examine the habits, environments, and internal narratives that shape your relationship to your creative practice — so that what happens next is a matter of choice.
What This Workshop Is (And Is Not)
• It is: a workshop for understanding the practice and conditions that support your writing life.
• It is not: a craft workshop. We will not be creating poems together in the sessions, nor offering critique.
• It is: designed to help you surface impediments and cultivate structures that support sustained creative engagement.
Teaching Philosophy:
Before we can improve the craft of writing, we have to get to the page in the first place. Creative work is often unlocked by discovering and articulating the sometimes hidden factors that either enable it or slow it down.
My role as facilitator is to offer a framework, tools, and distinctions that help writers recognize the forces shaping their creative lives and build structures that allow for more reliable access to the creative richness they already possess.
While designed with writers in mind, the framework may resonate with artists and others navigating similar creative challenges.
Tamara Nicholl-Smith 