As a Teaching Venue
Fordyce Academy will offer programmes in personal development, group development, organisation development and leadership development; and, for travellers with a tale, workshops in life-writing and storytelling.
Life Writing is an expansive genre that defies definition – a mysterious coming together of lived experience and the concept of the Self as it arises in writing. We are storytelling organisms who, in our continual interpretation of life-events, make ourselves in the stories we tell.
This deliberate process of interpreting the events of our lives in our particularly worldly context and integrating them into our sense-of-Self, is about ‘being’ and ‘knowing’. And so, as both an ontological and an epistemological inquiry, self-making in writing is always a promise-of-change for both the writer and the reader.
"Narrative and life go together and so the principal attraction of narrative-as-method is its capacity to render life experiences, both personal and social, in relevant and meaningful ways.”
Connelly and Clandinin, Educational Researcher, 1990
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The former classrooms will become spaces for discussion and creative collaboration - where participants will be able to engage in reflection and dialogue that transcends subject divides, disciplinary boundaries and methodological frameworks; that gives credence to different modes of reasoning; and that honours the ongoing history of understanding that we are all born into, enabling us to re-interpret the world and, in so doing, change it.
‘To seek to understand is to acknowledge that – for all our differences – we inhabit a shared world. And to acknowledge that we inhabit such a world is to recognise ourselves as ethical beings who bear moral responsibility for one another.’
Jon Nixon
Fordyce Academy will offer programmes in personal development, group development, organisation development and leadership development; and, for travellers with a tale, workshops in life-writing and storytelling.
The venue will be available for-hire for the exclusive use of groups to talk and think together in its beautifully refurbished inside-and-outside spaces.
The Academy will provide exhibition and performance space in its large, light-filled front halls.
In a world ever-more depleted, ever-more fractured, and ever-more at war, we need, as never before, the questioners and the interpreters who can, together, search for a new way of thinking that is not of the order of consciousness that gave rise to the multiple crises we are witnessing. System-failure calls for system-renewal. Breakdown calls out for breakthrough.
“To seek to understand is to acknowledge that – for all our differences – we inhabit a shared world. And to acknowledge that we inhabit such a world is to recognise ourselves as ethical beings who bear moral responsibility for one another.”
Jon Nixon, citing Hans-George Gadamer, 2017
Wicked Company is an international network of social-change professionals who are committed to the development of Self and Others in communities and organisations. Their Fourth Gathering will take place in Iceland, from Tuesday 1st September – Thursday 3rd September 2026, in the Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland.
“No-one has a life worthy of consideration about which a story cannot be told.”
Hannah Arendt
Life Writing is an expansive genre that defies definition – a mysterious, even magical coming together of autobiography with the concept of the Self as it arises in writing. We are storytelling organisms who, in our continual interpretation and reinterpretation of life-events, make ourselves in the stories we tell of who we are; reflecting in-writing, supports this important work of self-making.
From June 29th- July 3rd, 2026, we will be offering a Life-Writing Retreat at La Garriga de Castelladral, a farmhouse of medieval origins restored now as a charming eco-hotel in the Catalan Mountains, Spain.
“Telling stories is our usual means of presenting to thought and attempting to make sense of the processes of lived experience, actual or imaginable…The framing of stories seems to be fundamental to human self-understanding; without it we would probably have little sense of identity, individual or collective. (‘We are the ones who did this and to whom this happened’)… We tell stories about our lives in order to find meaning in what we have done and undergone, and one could hardly wish it were otherwise."
Nick Davis, Narrative Form and Insight, 2007
A leadership story – one well told – reflects, refracts and makes sense of things. On the 7 th of October 2026, we will be offering an introduction to working with story in organisations at the Academy.