I’m guest reader at two festivals this year – the Southland Festival of the Arts at the end of April, and Auckland Writers and Readers Festival in May. I’ll be running a single-session Reading for Writing workshop in Invercargill on May 1st – I’ll post fuller details in the sidebar when they come to hand, or you can check the festival website. Don’t know yet if I’ll be running workshops in Auckland too, or just reading. Either way, April and May look like being busy and fun months!
But more immediately – I’m planning to offer two workshops before the festival season starts.
The first one is an Editing Masterclass, planned for the end of this month – in good time for the NZPS competition. It’s quite full-on, so will have to be split over two days. Those who are interested in attending will be asked to submit a poem in advance. I would hope to be able to give every poem some workshopping time, but the focus of the course is learning the methods for doing hard editing yourself, and seeing them put into practice. (If we end up with a good core group who are interested in doing this sort of thing on a more regular basis, I may try to organise a recurring workshopping class.)
Details:
Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th February, 10 am to 1 pm.
Minimum of 6, maximum of 12 people.
Cost ~$40
Venue: the boardroom at the South Christchurch library.
Cafe Red is on the premises, and will be open during both sessions.
The second possible workshop would be a variation on the Jump-starting the Muse class – a poetry writing marathon! Tentatively planned for the first weekend in April, as a nod to NaPoWriMo. A huge series of writing exercises, designed to give you lots of first drafts that you can work on over the rest of the month (or, in my case, probably a couple of years at least …)
I’m thinking of keeping this one quite fluid, with two three-hour sessions and the option of attending a single session or both. Up to the individual. Not sure yet whether we will be all doing the same exercise, or if I’ll give each participant their own, and at the end of each flurry we pass the exercise to the person next to us (to introduce a sort of pass-the-parcel feel). The former makes for a more cohesive group, but the latter might be a bit better for people to just drop in. I’d be there to assist, or supply a new exercise for those who get stuck. But the aim would be just to write and write and write.
If either or both of these sound like something you’d be interested in, use the contact form below to get in touch asap!
A Dark Feathered Art 