The Experience of Manx Literature Festival’s “Writer’s Day” on Saturday the 27th of September.

by Aaron Leslie Couhig.

I’m writing this to describe how I found the events of the Writer’s Day panels and workshops at St. Ninian’s church in Douglas on the 27th of September 2025. I was generously invited to the event in exchange for a summary about my day there, my experience as a Student at UCM.

The day started at 9 AM, with registration of the guests. I arrived early, so I got to have a hot drink with others who arrived early before the event began. I felt very welcomed by the hospitality. After registration, we were shown upstairs to the Church’s gallery, where we signed our names on what workshops we wanted to take part in. I chose group 1, which began with “Ideas to help you turn something you love into words” , a workshop led by Sue King. Before this began though, we each took our seats on cushioned chairs to listen to a fascinating discussion panel on Folklore with Joanne Harris and Kyle Withington, who introduced their individual projects and talked about the influence of Folklore on people and drawing inspiration from it to create your own stories, or even creating your own Folklore. I thought Withington’s project, Isle of Mona, was really interesting and I plan to listen to it as soon as possible.

At 10 AM, the first workshop began. The whole group split into two smaller groups. Group 2 went downstairs to the ground floor whilst group 1 stayed in the gallery for our workshop with Sue King. We did some work on coming up with ideas on what to write based on our passions. Then we started the basic outline of a story around those ideas. After this, we were told to get into pairs. I ended up meeting an author called Michael Clark, and we were told to swap our sheets of paper and evaluate each other’s work. Michael based his work around his pre-existing novel called “Belonging”. It’s about finding where you belong, and settling down. Our work was very different since mine was about adventure on the ocean and not feeling like I belong in the same place. We shared a few ideas about each other’s work and the work we’re developing at the moment. He told me all about his comedic compendium of different zany characters based off of Folklore and Manx locations who are all meant to live in the Isle of Man, while I shared some work I’ve been doing on a Sci-Fi tragedy novel called “Refugee Ship Apollyon”. It was a real pleasure to meet him.

Lunch and snacks were provided to all guests, which really made the whole event feel more lively and welcoming. All the attendees shuffled down the stairs and queued up at the snack bar for cups of tea or biscuits, and the wide selection of sandwiches on offer at lunchtime was lovely. There was even enough for leftovers near the end of the day.

After lunch we had a few discussions from fiction writers Clare Mackintosh and MJ Arlidge about thrilling the reader and about how to write novels. They talked about several examples of their own work and research they did to create said work, the process was very fascinating and the authors described it in great detail. It made me very interested in picking up their books and reading them.

I learned a lot in Clare’s workshop on writing novels. She talked about different character’s, how to write their motives and story arcs, how to bring their stories into the wider story of the novel at large and discussed things like the three act structure, heroes journey, rising and falling action and we discussed and analysed different story structures from popular fiction and media.

In conclusion, the day was well worth it. It was informative, fun and introduced me to a lot of new authors and their works. The hospitality at the event was excellent and the staff were great. The panelists were interesting and the topics were fascinating. I enjoyed the day very much and I will attend next year - as a paying customer. Hopefully, more students will be present, so that these stories and works can continue to be carried on and preserved for future years to come.