Imagined Spaces is an independent online arts and educational website, a reading group and a pop-up not-for-profit publishing venture arising from a desire to use literature to have conversations about how we are to be in the world, how to engage with one another, and how better to teach and learn.

Using the essay as form and means, we take writing to be a practice for thinking and enquiring, and thinking and enquiring as a means of making more writing. We encourage encounters as exchanges, initiating conversations with people from all walks of life to explore what it means to be alive today. Such conversations about books and art are at the heart of what we term “essaying” – to be open to uncertainty and questioning, to trust the imagination, to follow a line of enquiry in writing and reading to wherever it leads… at whatever age and from whatever background.

We aim to build into the blue, to be less-risk adverse and more creative adventures in our learning and making processes, and thus we are less prescriptive as to what an essay should be, or what scholastic form it should take.

Our conversations led to a host of events, staged in person, at various venues in Scotland (Hospitalfield House, Royal Society of Edinburgh, University of Dundee, V&A Dundee) and at Brasenose and Merton College, Oxford, and also online. And these events are just the start… 

We mean to carry on as we started, so drop us a line and be part of these conversations!