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 Rata 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 Winter Writing Intensive
Launching July 2026
A container for writers with an ongoing practice who are ready to stop apologising in their work.
Over eight weeks, we will work with heat — the charge, desire, and intensity that makes writing alive — and meet it with discipline: deliberate attention, cutting cleanly, embodied rigour.
Heat can make us flinch. It can make us apologise. It can make us rush to tidy things up. We’ll practise something else: staying close. Keeping contact with what’s charged without shrinking it or turning it into spectacle.
This is about staying with what is alive long enough to shape it well.
This space is for writers who are already in conversation with their work, even if quietly, and ready to give it sustained focus.
Small cohort.
One 1:1 mentoring session.
Thursdays 10am–12pm (NZT).
Full details and enrolment opening soon.
Join the waitlist to be notified first.
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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.