Ria

Ria is a creative-workshop leader whose direct, playful guidance helps young people speak openly and make work without treating self-expression as something that requires an apology. Through her friendship with Robbie, she becomes part of Ava’s creative community; later, her advice gives Gideon a concrete way to stop revising and send a letter to Ava.

Identity and Creative Community

Ria is described as mad and curvy, with a closely shaved head except for a longer strip of hair that falls down one side of her face. She dyes it different colours; at one workshop it is silver-grey, and on another occasion it is fluorescent orange. Her many small tattoos include a Doctor Who sleeve running down her left arm. A bracelet jingles as she tosses a small plastic ball during a class, giving her informal manner a lively, physical presence.

Ria and Robbie are friends. Robbie introduced Ava to Ria three years earlier, and Ava began attending classes before moving on to poetry competitions and socialising with a group of about fifteen young people who write, make theatre, and produce short films. The classes initially aimed to build confidence and encourage what Robbie called normal social interactions with peers. Ava’s wry observation that the group is not definitively normal complicates that goal: Ria’s community offers connection without requiring its members to fit a conventional idea of normality.

Workshops and Participation

Ria opens each workshop with a check-in, asking participants to rate how they feel on a scale from one to ten. One means the worst possible day; Ava gives herself a seven. The scale is deliberately simple enough for everyone to use, even when their circumstances differ. Ava takes the numbers seriously but recognizes that another person’s low rating may reflect a concern that seems small from the outside. The routine makes room for individual experience without turning the check-in into a competition over whose distress is most legitimate.

The workshops also use a new question each week, shifting between existential subjects and playful hypotheticals. In one session, Ria asks what superpower participants would choose. Ava answers invisibility, and Norma immediately calls the answer bullshit. Ria’s format invites personal responses while allowing the group’s exchanges to remain irreverent rather than solemn.

Teaching Style and Rules

Ria encourages participants to begin creating rather than pre-emptively defending what they make. When Gideon repeatedly apologises, she tells him he does it too much and jokes that she will body-slam him if he starts another sentence in class with sorry. He answers with another apology, prompting Ria to run at him laughing. Beneath the joke is a clear boundary: she says an apology is needed when someone has offended or physically hurt another person, not as a reflexive disclaimer for speaking.

Her broader instruction is that participants do not need to apologise for existing: what they have to say is valid, and the group wants to hear it. She urges them to own both their art and their existence, while also telling them not to be dickheads. The combination matters. Ria’s encouragement is not permission to disregard others; it pairs confidence in self-expression with responsibility for how one treats people.

Influence on Gideon

Ria’s teaching carries beyond the workshop when Gideon tries to write to Ava again. After receiving a reply that reassures him his first letter was welcome, he worries about getting the next one wrong and recognizes his tendency to obsess over what he writes. He recalls Ria’s insistence on diving in rather than justifying or endlessly revising creative work.

At home, Gideon puts a timer on his desk and gives himself thirty minutes. Whatever he writes in that time must go into the envelope; he addresses and stamps it so that his mother can post it the next day, reducing the temptation to alter it. He starts slowly, then gets into a flow. When the timer rings, he signs the letter. Ria is not present, but her classroom rule has become a practical method: trust the work enough to send it, rather than treating imperfection as a reason to remain silent.