About Inkling

Inkling Writing Studio is a place to spark imaginations, develop skills and awaken joy in young minds through creative writing. We offer classes tailored to age groups ranging between Years K-8, including multi-week after-school classes, school holiday workshops and individual mentoring. We also offer bespoke workshops on request. 

Inkling's aim is to help young writers discover and explore the rich world of their imaginations through storytelling and writing. Our classes provide time, space, opportunity and inspiration for children to get to know their creative selves, and learn how to much fun it can be to invent stories and poems.

Inkling's core values and practice are built on the following ideas:

• Learning should be fun! If a lesson isn't fun, a child is far less likely to engage and process what they're being taught. Over the years, Inkling has dreamt up a huge array of activities – from quizzes to word games, free writing to story webs – getting kids animated, giggling and paying attention.

• Every child's creativity deserves to be supported. Inkling respects and encourages each and every student, guiding them through their creative journey on their own terms. Our small class sizes enable us to do this. Inkling also actively fosters a class culture of kindness, with teachers modelling feedback. Students are encouraged to find delight and appreciation in each other’s creativity.

• Writing is a process. It isn't an end goal. It's an ongoing, multiskilled, multi-stage activity that takes plenty of time and practice to get good at. It involves idea generation, planning, vocabulary, sentence construction and spelling (to name a few). Inkling classes nourish all of these skills, and are organised around the process of planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing, with students given strategies to master every aspect.

• Good writers are good readers. Children who read regularly and broadly – and love to do so – have a significant advantage when learning to write. Reading inspires them to think of story ideas. It exposes them to different kinds of story genres and structures. It also introduces them to the power and enjoyment of a well-told story. Every class, children discuss the books they are reading, and we often read passages aloud for inspiration.

Alison Gorman

Inkling Founder, Director and Teacher

After working as a speech pathologist for 15 years, Alison embarked on one of life’s most creative journeys and became a mother of two gorgeous sons, Sam and Will.

As she watched them start to pen their first stories, memories of her childhood passion of writing stirred. She found her 1976 Holly Hobby journal, dusted it off, and read the romantic, earnest plays she had written as a teen. They made her smile, then they made her nostalgic – then they made her act. 

A few years later, she had obtained a Masters of Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. Since then, poetry has become central to her life: a source of joy, a method of play, and a wonderful prism to help her understand her world. Alison now writes almost every day, and her poetry has been published in various Australian literary journals, from Cordite to Contrapasso. In 2016, she won the Meanjin Dorothy Porter Poetry Award.

After teaching creative writing workshops at Ku-Ring-Gai Arts Centre, Alison founded Inkling Writing Studio. It is her great joy to see a love of creative writing bloom in her young pupils, and there is not a class that has gone by without her being astonished by the ideas, worlds and wonders they can summon.