Workshops for 2025

April 1st to 30th, 2025
NZNaPoWriMo – thirty poems in thirty days

Back by popular request, NZNaPoWriMo! Yes, once again The Poetry Class is hosting the annual challenge to write a poem every day for the month of April.

NaPoWriMo is a (mostly online) writing challenge, to celebrate April being National Poetry Month in the USA. Every April, people from all over the world set themselves the challenge of writing a poem every day for thirty days.

Share (or not) your attempts, joys, struggles, thoughts, and fantasies of vengeance against me for my twisty, shifty, tricksy exercises … how hard could it be?

Spring 2025

October 4th / 5th, 2025
Examining the Ockhams: Liar, Liar

A one-off Reading for Writing class looking at the collection that took out this year’s Mary and Peter Biggs Prize for Best Poetry Collection at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards – Emma Neale’s Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit.

November 1st, 2025
Eco-Poetry with guest tutor, Gail Ingram

We love to write about our seas and landscapes. Yet our taiao is wildly-threatened and it’s all been said before. So how might we keep it alive and insightful? 

Join award-winning poet and teacher, Gail Ingram, as she shares some contemporary ‘nature’ poems from her recent collection anthology (n.) a collection of flowers alongside pieces from a small number of other Aotearoa poets to highlight different stratagems of form and layering meaning. The selected poems explore 21st-century themes and concepts of colonisation, climate change, art and family. She will give writing exercises to help put these ideas into practice.

November 8th, 2025
Reading for Writing: Look Onely

A single session Reading for Writing class, looking at one random recent(ish) poetry collection pulled from my bookcase. What book will it be? How about Nick Ascroft’s It’s What He Would Have Wanted, (THWUP, 2025)?