This week series two of my Wind&Bones Creative Café for Writers in Tainan begins!

The series is hosted in collaboration with Wansha Arts in their cosy Aglow Space. There are comfy sofas, writing desks, tea and lots of inspiration. Series one was a lot of fun: each session was fully booked and full of energy and I’m looking forward to more of the same.

I really believe in making art, literature and creativity as accessible as possible and so I’m delighted that these events are free for those who attend.

I'm sharing an essay I wrote about the upcoming series below.

Writing is a lot of things but it isn’t a mysterious gift that we are born with. It is not magic—or not exactly, even if it can feel that way when the words we are putting on to the page flow like water, or when we are lost in a gripping book. Instead, writing is a skill that we can learn, one that we can develop over time. Nobody is born knowing how to write. Learning to write takes practice and concentration. But we can also cultivate this skill in fun ways: by giving ourselves the opportunity to be creative, through sharing ideas with old and new friends, and by looking for—and finding—inspiration in unexpected places.

We all have stories to tell and experiences to share. And writing is a powerful way of doing this. If you have ever wanted to write, this writing café is the opportunity you need. Come and join us, and transform your ideas, personal perspectives, experiences, reflections, preoccupations, obsessions into stories, poems, essays, memoirs, play-scripts, performances and much more besides.

Let your imagination run free, as you turn your thoughts into something real and lasting. There’s a unique thrill in watching a blank page fill with words that come entirely from your own mind—as your stories take shape, one sentence at a time. 

Your host at the Wansha Performing Arts Centre creative café for writers is Dr. Hannah Stevens. Hannah is a writer from the UK currently living in Tainan. Alongside Dr Will Buckingham, she co-directs Wind&Bones: an independent publisher of fiction and non-fiction books. Through Wind&Bones Hannah also produces projects on the themes of writing, storytelling, philosophy and positive social change.

Hannah has a PhD in Creative Writing. Her debut book, a short story collection called In Their Absence, was published in 2021 and has been translated in to Bulgarian. Her next book, On the Bodies of Strangers, will be published 2026. A lover of short stories, she is currently working on her third book: a collection of stories inspired by her time living and working in Taiwan which she started writing as writer in residence in the Taiwan Literature Base, Taipei. Hannah has produced projects all over the world, in collaboration with the Scottish Government, Creative Scotland, the British Embassy, Greenpeace, and the BBC.

The creative café for writers is held once every two weeks. It is an interactive event that includes a mini lecture on a carefully chosen writing theme, creative prompts, lots of time to write, and the opportunity to share your words and your stories. The creative café for writers is a bilingual event, led in English with some translation into Mandarin. Attendees are welcome to write and share stories and poems in any language they like! Bring a pen and paper, or a laptop to write on. A range of freshly-brewed teas are also available to keep you refreshed during the sessions.

In this this second season of the creative café for writers, we are going to be exploring an array of exciting genres. On 5th June 2025, join us for a session on Ghost Stories. Since ancient times, ghost stories—tales of spirits who return from the dead to haunt the places they left behind—have figured prominently in the folklore of many cultures. And perhaps nowhere is this more the case than Taiwan, where almost everyone has a ghost story to share. In this creative café for writers we will explore stories of ghosts and ghost experiences—whether in fiction or in real life—and capture these stories on the page.

Science fiction — often shortened to sci-fi — is a genre of speculative fiction that asks about the futures that await us. Through exploring and reimagining the future — whether this is a future of advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, extraterrestrial life —  sci-fi also asks urgent questions about our contemporary reality, about our hopes and our dreams. It might seem that sci-fi is a modern phenomenon, but it goes back as far as the second century AD, when Lucian of Samosata, a Greek-speaking author of Assyrian descent, wrote A True Story, a tale of intergalactic voyaging this is sometimes considered the very first work of science fiction. Join us on 19th June to find out more.

Our 3rd July, the creative café for writers will see us exploring children’s literature. Children’s books were perhaps our first entry into the world of stories. And many of us still cherish the books and stories we read as young people.Children’s literature can be exciting and adventurous, it can be thought-provoking and funny, it can be comforting and unsettling. Maybe you have a child in your life with whom you want to share stories. A fable, a fairy tale, maybe a poem… what will you write?

And finally, we will look at Magical Realism. What happens when the everyday and the fantastic merge? Or what happens when we realise that the world is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine?  “Magical Realism” is the term given to stories where the everyday world takes on an undercurrent of the magical, or the mythical. What happens when you bump into Mazu in the 7-Eleven? Or if a small town is suddenly inundated by an unexpected blizzard of butterflies? In this 17th July session writers and storytellers will have the opportunity to get creative and write stories that blur the line between fantasy and reality.

The creative café for writers at Wansha Performing Arts Centre is completely free to attend. We warmly invite everyone to participate. Total beginners and experienced writers are welcome to join us and take part. Alongside writing, the café is also a place to connect with new friends, to forge a creative community here in Tainan and, most of all, to feel inspired.