STRANGE WORLD: A DAVID LYNCH WRITING WORKSHOP

STRANGE WORLD: A DAVID LYNCH WRITING WORKSHOP 

Length: 5x2 hour workshops (10 hours total) plus optional film viewings 

Workshop Recording Date: Oct 2024

Facilitator: Sophie Robinson 

In a white picket-fenced suburbia of perfectly pruned rose bushes and manicured lawns, the discovery of a decapitated ear interrupts the idyll. So begins David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet.

Strange World is a Devotion’s love letter to Lynch’s cinematic universe.  Each of the five workshops takes a single Lynch film a springboard for the week’s promos and techniques, transforming the cinematic into a a writing practice. 

 Like Lynch, we will over the course of these sessions turn toward the shadows – both our personal shadows, and the shadows of the world at large. We'll work with ideas of dream, imagination, the underworld and shifting and splitting realities. We'll write from prompts based on the films and their network of references and ideas.  And we’ll explore what happens when we make eye contact with the things that frighten us the most. 

• Doubling, mirroring and parallel worlds
• Working with dream, vision and nightmare
• Extended metaphor and allegory
• Subtext and speech
• Creating powerful imagery and themes
• Working with metafiction

STRUCTURE & FILMS

Each week is organised around a single film, and it can be helpful to watch the film in advance, but clips are shown and context explained throughout, so it isn’t essential. 

Week One: The Straight Story (1999)

Week Two: Blue Velvet (1986)

Week Three: Dune (1984)

Week Four: Lost Highway (1997)

Week Five: Mulholland Drive (2001) 

REDUX//RECORDINGS FROM THE DEVOTION WORKSHOP ARCHIVES

REDUX is your chance to dip into our archive of workshop recordings and purchase past courses at a lower rate to take in your own time.

Each workshop will take you through a series of writing prompts and allow you to write in “real” time along with live participants.

Upon purchase you will receive an email with a link to all course materials, and a password. Purchase of the course grants you 12 months access to all the video recordings of the workshop, as well as extensive written and audio materials, prompts, and further reading.

SOPHIE ROBINSON is a poet, novelist, nonfiction writer and teacher. She is the author of Prairie Oyster (2026) and Rabbit (2018). Her writing has been published in Granta, The Guardian, Stylist, BOMB Magazine, The Believer, N+1, The Poetry Review and The White Review. 

Sophie founded Devotion in 2020 as a radical, inclusive and accessible creative writing workshop space. She was previously a full time assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia for ten years, and has facilitated public creative writing workshops at the Tate, the V&A, the ICA, the British Library, Arvon, The Poetry Society, and The National Poetry Library.

Devotion workshop testimonials

‘Despite years of formal education, I never had as meaningful an opportunity to develop my craft. Devotion fosters and nurtures a thoughtful, inclusive space for people to grow in their writing and their practice.’

‘I have attended every Devotion workshop so far & every time has been incredible. The mix of poetry, music, film & art as inspiration makes it so stimulating & like a little party for the heart - because that's what Devotion seems to access, subtle connections to feeling.

‘Devotion has become a must in my life now & I would probably cancel most other things to be there because it does something that nothing else has ever done for me in my writing & has changed me in other more spiritual senses too. The space is nurturing & allows for everybody to be who they need to be on any given day.’

Refund Policy

Please note: This is an archival recording of a previously live Devotion workshop.
Your purchase includes access to the workshop recording and any accompanying materials listed on this page. Due to the digital nature of the product and immediate access being provided after purchase, archival workshop recordings are non-refundable.

Recordings and materials are for personal use only and must not be shared, copied, redistributed or reproduced without permission.