The Writers’ Gym Podcast

Visibility and Voice: InkCouragement with Dr Rachel Knightley

Showing up for yourself and sharing your achievements can be scary, but instead of waiting for the feelings to change we can shift the focus to action that empowers.If you enjoyed listening to the Writers' Gym Podcast, head to our websites at www.writersgym.com, www.rachelknightleycoaching.com, and follow us on instagram: @jointhewritersgym @rachelknightleycoaching

Lucy Kate Barnes in conversation with Dr Rachel Knightley

Lucy Kate Barnes, Trustee and Co-Founder of Lawyers Who Care
Dr Rachel Knightley’s guest at the Writers’ Gym is her coaching client, award-winning advocate Lucy Kate Barnes.
Lucy grew up on council estates. She went into care at 13 and fell off the "care cliff" at 16. Aged 18, she studies law at Surrey. She is now a barrister. Alongside her legal career, she set up charity Lawyers Who Care and is a vocal advocate for children's rights and social mobility for disadvantaged young people. She won Diversity Champion of the Year 2025 and was one of the Universities UK 100 Faces Campaign to celebrate the first in families to go to university. 
Learn more about Lucy here: 
Website: Lucykatebarnes.co.ukSubstack: Theadvocatewithin.substack.co.uk Instagram: @lucykatebarnes
If you enjoyed listening to the Writers' Gym Podcast, head to our website at www.writersgym.com and follow us on instagram: @jointhewritersgym

It Is What It Is: Ink Couragement with Dr Rachel Knightley

Rachel shares how a common phrase helps us cut through what we fear and focus on what we want — instead of getting caught up in unhelpful ‘what-ifs’ that suppress the creative ones. If you enjoyed listening to the Writers' Gym Podcast, head to our websites at www.writersgym.com, www.rachelknightleycoaching.com, and follow us on instagram: @jointhewritersgym @rachelknightleycoaching

Helen Marshall in conversation with Dr Rachel Knightley

Helen Marshall, multi-award-winning author and academic 
Dr Rachel Knightley is joined at the Writers' Gym by World Fantasy and British Fantasy Award winning author, Dr Helen Marshall. Helen is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Queensland. She has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award for her three collections of short stories. Her debut novel The Migration argued for the need to remain hopeful, even in the worst circumstances. It was one of The Guardian’s top science fiction books of the year. Her second novel The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl who Loved Death was released in 2025.
Learn more about Helen Marshall here: https://helen-marshall.com/
Instagram: @hairside
If you enjoyed listening to the Writers' Gym Podcast, head to our website at www.writersgym.com and follow us on instagram: @jointhewritersgym

Boundaries and Writing

Most of us are looking for more time. But what if instead of looking for more of it, we first look at our beliefs around how we ‘should’ use the time we already have? Dr Rachel Knightley offers thoughts and strategies around time, writing and how we allow ourselves to create the things we want to put in the world. 

Ramsey Campbell in conversation with Dr Rachel Knightley

Dr Rachel's Knightley's guest is Ramsey Campbell, defined by The Oxford Companion to English Literature as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. The Washington Post sums up his work as “one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction”. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. His latest novels are Fellstones, The Lonely Lands, The Incubations, An Echo of Children and Ancestral. 
 
His Brichester Mythos trilogy consists of The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm. His most recent collections are Fearful Implications, a two-volume retrospective roundup (Phantasmagorical Stories) and The Village Killings and Other Novellas. 
 
His non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably and Ramsey Campbell, Certainly. Ramsey’s Rambles collects his video reviews, and Six Stooges and Counting is an appreciation of the Three Stooges. Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal is a history of horror fiction in fifty limericks. 
 
https://www.ramseycampbell.com

What it Is vs What it Means

If you’re getting distracted or put off from writing, it might just be you’re spending more time in the ‘what-does-this-say-about-me’ fog than in the idea at its centre: to write your story, and to discover what that story is by writing it. Dr Rachel Knightley demonstrates how our energy, focus and time can be sucked away into that fog, or channeled into creativity. 

I Should be Doing Something Else

Dr Rachel Knightley draws an the Excuses Bingo card she and members of the Writers’ Gym created in a recent workshop, and works through how each of these ‘reasons’ not to write might just contain a reminder of why we really want to write in the first place.

Doug Naylor: Sin Bin Island, Red Dwarf and remembering Rob Grant

Dr Rachel Knightley is joined at the Writers' Gym by Emmy award winning script-writer, novelist and director Doug Naylor. He co-created the long running hugely successful sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, has written or co-written every episode across thirteen series and has directed over twenty episodes. Doug also co-founded Grant Naylor Productions in 1991 which made series IV to X of Red Dwarf. Doug has also written three best selling novels, and a few non-best selling ones too. He co-wrote a number one single which shall remain nameless, but has the words Song and Chicken in the title. Doug also co-created the Carlton TV series The 10 Percenters, for which his script Table 11 won a British Comedy award. Formerly he was Head writer and Script editor on the original run of the hugely popular satirical puppet show Spitting Image and he has also written a number of award winning radio shows. His alma mater was Liverpool University where he claims he was thrown out, at the end of his second year, for drinking too slowly. In September 2025, Doug’s children’s novel Sin Bin Island was published by David Fickling Books and he is currently working on the second in the series.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Naylor
 
https://www.pbjmanagement.co.uk/artists/doug-naylor

Lee Murray in conversation with Dr Rachel Knightley

Dr Rachel Knightley is joined at the Writers' Gym by Lee Murray ONZM (Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit) . Lee is a writer, editor, poet and screenwriter from Aotearoa New Zealand, a Shirley Jackson Award and five-time Bram Stoker Award® winner. A USA Today bestselling author with more than forty titles to her credit, including novels, collections, anthologies, nonfiction, poetry, and several books for children, Lee holds a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction, and is an Honorary Literary Fellow of the New Zealand Society of Authors. Among her recent works are feature film Grafted (directed by Sasha Rainbow), horror anthology This Way Lies Madness (Flame Tree Press) co-edited with Dave Jeffery, and prose-poetry collection, NZSA Cuba Press Prize-winner Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud (The Cuba Press). 
 
Read more at https://www.leemurray.info/