Saturday 6th November, 9.30am - 12.30pm
DIRT is a new poetry imprint from Dialect, publishing collaborative poems inspired by climate change. For this year’s Stroud Book Festival we are offering a workshop for participants to develop site-specific work responding to the garden at Museum in the Park, Stroud.
Led by poets Alice Willitts and JLM Morton, we will take our own DIRT collaboration as a starting point, sharing our thoughts on why poetic collaborations are so fruitful for the global instability of current times. We will lead you through writing your own lines with others and editing your work together to create a co-authored poem. The workshop will culminate with a collective reading before planting the whole multi-vocal poem in the garden.
Every voice is welcome to this playful and experimental workshop, whether you’re a total beginner or have more writing experience. A sense of curiosity, joy and openness to collaboration is essential! The poem will be published by Dialect online after the event.
Venue: Museum in the Park, Stratford Park, Stratford Road, Stroud, Glos, GL5 4AF
Cost: £40 (3 hour workshop)
Bios…
JLM Morton is a poet, author of two pamphlets: Lake 32, her exploration of a year in the life of a lake and Sentient (collaboration with artist Susie Hetherington) a meditation on hedgerows, resilience and renewal. Her work has featured on the BBC, in the Sunday Telegraph, at Ledbury Poetry Festival and in numerous poetry journals and magazines. In 2021 Juliette was awarded an Arts Council grant to work on a collection exploring the role of trade cloth in colonial expansion. She is poet in residence for Stroudwater Textile Trust. www.jlmmorton.com
Alice Willitts graduated from the University of East Anglia’s Poetry Masters with Distinction in 2018 as a mature student. She is the author of Think Thing: an ecopoetic practice (Elephant Press, 2021), With Love, (Live Canon, 2020) and Dear, (Magma, 2019). She co-founded On The Verge Cambridge and runs the #57 Poetry Collective. She co-edited the Collaborations issue of Magma in 2020. Alice is interested in entanglement, in speculative futures, in collaboration, in plant sciences and above all, in soil. She is the editor of DIRT, an ecopoetry collaborations imprint launching with Dialect in 2021. www.alicewillittspoet.uk