Welcome,
Creative Being
I’m so glad you found your way here.
This is a gathering place for creative weirdos, sensitive revolutionaries, poetic hearts, and anyone curious about living more intentionally in their own skin.
This is a place for tenderness, troublemaking, art-making, land-connection, queer sparks, and the messy beauty of becoming.
Here you’ll find writing, creative offerings, professional development, therapy, and research, all rooted in relational practice, groundedness, and a belief in many ways of being and knowing.
Take what you need.
Leave what you like.
Wander well.
You can find me
Making Mischief
Kia ora,
I’m Rātā Gordon
I’m a poet, creative arts therapist, educator, researcher, and general stirrer-of-wondrous-pots. I work at the intersection of creativity, care, and cultural inquiry, weaving together land, body, story, and mischief.
Work With Me
Work With Me
Choose Your Doorway
There are many ways to work, wonder, and weave meaning together.
Follow whatever doorway feels alive for you.
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Creative Mentoring
For writers, poets, and creative beings wanting to deepen their practice, move through stuckness, or create from a place of authenticity rather than pressure.
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Creative Arts Therapy / Counselling
An expressive, queer-affirming therapeutic space for adults wanting room to breathe, feel, unmask, and reconnect with themselves.
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Creative Supervision
Reflective, relational, culturally grounded supervision for therapists, educators, facilitators, and creative practitioners wanting deeper integrity and imagination in their mahi.
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Workshops, Courses & Retreats
Current and Upcoming Workshops, Courses & Retreats
Heat & Discipline
An 8-week online writing course with Rātā Gordon
Starts 10 June 2026
What forms of practice help us keep returning to the work?
Heat and Discipline is an 8-week online writing course exploring creativity, desire, resistance, ritual, and sustainable creative practice.
Together we will work with writing prompts, reflective exercises, discussion, and generative practices designed to help participants build a deeper relationship with their creative lives, not through rigid productivity, but through attention, experimentation, and return.
This course is for writers, artists, and creatively-inclined humans wanting:
renewed connection to their creative practice
structure without harshness
creative community and accountability
space for uncertainty, experimentation, and unfinishedness
forms of discipline that feel alive rather than extractive
Small cohort. Weekly group sessions.
One 1:1 mentoring session.
Wednesdays 7pm-9pm (NZT).
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Writings & Musings
Poetry, essays, and field notes from the edges and centers of creative life.
On Blog
In Print
On Line
In Motion
What Threads Everything Together
No matter which doorway you choose, all of my work is rooted in:
Creativity as catalyst for truth-telling and healing
Trauma-informed, relational ways of being
Embodiment: small, doable connections with the living body
Cultural consciousness and Tangata Tiriti responsibilities
A belief in many ways of knowing – poetic, somatic, intuitive, ancestral, land-based
Queer-affirming, neurodivergent-friendly practice
Humour, warmth, and a healthy dose of mischief
Deep respect for your timing, your complexity, and your becoming
And beneath all of that…
What ties my work together?
A kind of disciplined mischief. A devotion to creativity. A refusal to flatten complexity. A belief in bodies, land, story, and the queer art of becoming.
Whether we’re making art, telling the truth, shaking something loose, or sitting quietly with what feels tender, the invitation is always the same:
Come as you are, and let’s see what wants to grow.