Author: admin

Talks & Workshops

Sonia regularly leads workshops, walkshops and creative walks, and gives talks at festivals and events. Check back here for new dates and events coming up.

Immersive Place Writing Weekend: Saturday 18 & Sunday 19 October 2025, Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory

Explore, encounter, and capture your experiences of place in this immersive weekend workshop with writer Sonia Overall. We will visit sites around Sandwich Bay, observing and recording, working with writing prompts, and gathering ideas to develop into creative work. We’ll reflect on the ways writers evoke a sense of place, and how we can employ place writing across fiction, poetry and nonfiction. With the option to share work in progress in a supportive environment, this is an ideal opportunity to immerse yourself in your writing in a unique natural setting. Tickets £80 for a two-day event, 10am to 5pm each day, with lunch provided on both days: book here.

All Hallows Folkwalk: Saturday 1 November 2025, Sandwich

A short circular walk in historic Sandwich, celebrating the customs, folklore and rituals of Allhallowstide. Expect light-hearted ritual actions, readings and song at atmospheric stops along the way. Warming welcome drink and seasonal treat en route. Places are very limited – advanced booking essential. Tickets £8 (+ Eventbrite booking fee); ticket price includes a donation to the work of Sandwich Medieval Trust: book here.

Recent past events:

The Poetry of Birds, Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory, 14 September 2025

Introduction to Nature Writing Workshop, Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory, 11 May 2025

On Hemingway and Eden, in conversation, Faversham Literary Festival, 22 February 2025.

Death and the Carpenter

Parrot Theatre performs Sonia’s play Death and the Carpenter, a macabre folk tale featuring live music, mask and sinister puppetry.

The show toured in the South East in 2023 and 2024. Standalone performances are scheduled for 2025, including Faversham Literary Festival, and a one-week tour in East Anglia:

14 July Finchingfield Guildhall, Finchingfield, Essex

15 July The Puppet Theatre, Norwich, Norfolk

16 July Wells Maltings, Wells-next-the-sea, Norfolk

17 July The Maltings, Ely, Cambridgeshire

18 July Headgate Theatre, Colchester, Essex

19 July Southern Maltings, Ware, Hertfordshire

Pick a Drift

Fancy a walk? Choose a drift, follow the prompt and explore in new ways.

Drifts assembled for the 2020 Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography.

look sign

INSIDE

Explore your living space in silence, seeking the source of secret and hidden noises. Go on tiptoe, listening for squeaks and creaks. Follow the path of rumbling pipes. Seek out tiny cavities, containing echoes.

The room you are in is a landscape. Where is the horizon? What are those vast objects in the distance? Follow patterns underfoot. Walk perimeters like the edges of fields or shorelines. Find a pool of light to swim through or float on.

OUTSIDE

The aliens have landed! As you walk, look for evidence of interplanetary visitation in your environment. Can you find any unidentifiable objects? Is that strange, mutating botanical an alien plant species? The sings are out there…

Take a hide-and-seek wander. Look for, and give attention to, objects and creatures that usually go unnoticed. Seek out the partially obscured and hidden. Note some potential hiding places of your own.

ANYWHERE

Take a geometrical drift, collecting 2D shapes. Start with circles, then gather triangles, rectangles and squares. Keep working up through 5-, 6-, 7- and 8-sided shapes. See if you can push up to 10 – and beyond.

Follow the colour red, using your walk to join the dots between red objects and instances. See where it takes you.

4WCoP: Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography

4th-6th September 2020

Sonia will be at this year’s virtual 4WCoP, behind the scenes and in events. Come along!

The 4WCoP programme map, by Fiona Weir

Saturday 5th September, 19.00 BST. A psychogeographical poetry evening in the Congress’s virtual pub, The Psychogeographer and Compass. Sonia will be a reading a couple of poems from The Art of Walking.

Sunday 6th September, 10.00 BST. 4WCoP Distance Drift. Sonia hosts a special #DistanceDrift for the Congress: a live, synchronised drift, walking indoors or out, wherever you are. Meet at the virtual Bus Station. Go to Twitter and follow #DistanceDrift @soniaoverall to join in.

Sunday 6th September, 17.30 BST. Walk Don’t Walk Plenary. Sonia hosts the Congress plenary, featuring walking artists and practitioners. In the cafe.

At any time: Pick a Drift to walk in your own time. Hosted on this site and live for the Congress.

Distance Drifts

Walking together apart: Sunday lockdown walks

Sonia leading Distance Drifts, a series of Sunday morning synchronised walks hosted on social media.

#DistanceDrift is a space to walk alone – or in your social bubble – and connect with other walkers. Themed prompts keep the walks playful and interactive. Walks can be followed in any space, indoors or out.

Distance Drift poster
one of many Distance Drift posters made by the generous and talented Katy Whitaker

Distance Drifts started on the first Sunday in April 2020 and continued weekly for four years. Themes so far have included dealing from Sonia’s Drift Deck, walking by numbers, exploring islands, investigating Blue Moons, finding faces through pareidolia, vicarious adventures with mascots, walking with Alfred Hitchcock and scavenger hunting.

Synchronised Distance Drifts now take place on the first Sunday of the month at 10am, hosted on Bluesky. Follow Sonia’s Bluesky account and #DistanceDrift for a live prompt to walk in sync, or follow the thread in your own time.

Streetwalking

a walking women’s manifesto

created by participants at the POW! Thanet festival, 17th March 2019

provocations

We should feel entitled to our own space. We should be walking to ‘look’, not to be looked at. We should walk in our own footsteps and not follow others. We have as much right to take up space as anyone else. (If 17% of the crowd are women, everyone thinks there are as many women as men!)

actions

Take back the joy of walking for its own sake. Be proud – claim the space. Be brave. Be bold. Walk where you want to. Be daring in your gaze. Look at other women. Love people-watching. Smile and say hello to people. You’ll be surprised. Walk smiling. Walk frowning. Walk alone and uninhibited. Walk in new places, exploring. Be a child when walking, totally absorbed in the environment, not caring what others think. Walk happily, free of glancing at a mobile phone. Always night walk at the full moon. Banish the thought of being murdered as you walk. If you don’t want to walk alone, get a dog or borrow one. Do not follow someone else’s footsteps. Follow your own path to create your own dreams, not someone else’s. Walk through life and try to find the strength to share.

needs

Empathy for women’s spaces. Public design of space, managing pavements, restricting cars. No parking on pavements. No racing towards zebra and pelican crossings when someone is crossing. Respect for pedestrians. Better pavement surfaces. Better street lighting. Protection of public toilets to enjoy walking.

wishes

For street homeless women to be safe. To make the environment shine for all women walkers, including those for whom walking is too often imposed.

Texts for a feminist survival kit

readings from the walk & recommendations from participants

  • Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life
  • Angelou, Maya. I Rise
  • Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre
  • Burns, Anna. Milkman
  • Carter, Angela. Wise Children
  • Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse
  • Fey, Tina. Bossypants
  • Rhys, Jean. Quartet and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
  • Rich, Adrienne. ‘When We Dead Awaken’
  • Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust
  • Wesley, Mary. The Camomile Lawn
  • Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway