In The Writing Shed

What’s the difference between journaling and creative writing - and which one are you being called towards right now? In this episode, let's explore the beautiful line between writing to process your own life and writing to create a story beyond yourself. Journaling can be a mirror: a place to untangle thoughts, emotions, conversations, memories, and the things that circle in your head at thre...

It's 1994. I am 18 years old, sitting at a chaotic bedroom desk, writing a letter in my best handwriting to a girl called Chris in Austria. I had never met her. We would write to each other for three years. In this episode, I make the case for slow letters: what they give us that a text or email never can, why waiting for a reply is its own quiet joy, and what Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and V...

Do you have a notebook - or several - that you bought with every intention of filling... and didn't? Do you love the idea of writing but hear a quiet voice asking: who do you think you are? In this episode, I trace where that voice comes from, dismantles the myth of the "real writer," and make the case that the most expensive thing you can do is keep listening to it. Featuring Toni M...

Think of someone you love. When did you last truly tell them what they mean to you? This week in the Writing Shed is different. There's less talking from me, and more space for you. Because today, we're writing a letter. To anyone: living or not, present or thirty years gone. I open with a beautiful trunk full of letters, my mother's handwriting, and the things that went unsaid. I make...

One afternoon, Dani went for a walk she almost didn't take. She put her headphones in, ready to be productive. And then she stopped. And took them out. And wrote one paragraph on her phone, standing under the trees. That paragraph changed something. This episode is about romanticising your life — not the Instagram version, but the Romantic-poet version: paying fierce, deliberate attention to t...

There's a trunk in my Writing Shed covered in roses and butterflies and French script. Inside it lives some of my most precious possessions: letters and notes from my mother. In this episode I'm opening that trunk and sharing what I found inside. What her letters taught me about love, about presence, and about the voices we almost lose. And how, when she died suddenly and I was travelling...

What if the most important conversation of your life started with a casual "really good" over lunch? In this first episode of In The Writing Shed, I want to tell you about a film my father recommended to me over 20 years ago, and how that quiet, ordinary moment has shaped everything I think about time, presence, and the people we love. We're talking about Tuesdays with Morrie: the st...

Welcome to "In the Writing Shed with Dani Pescuma": a cosy, creative space for women who feel the quiet pull toward storytelling, but aren't sure yet if they're "allowed" to call themselves writers. Every Tuesday, I'll open a door for you. Sometimes we'll talk about finding your voice - the one underneath all the noise and the self-doubt. Sometimes we'll exp...