Author: sujen
02:52:10 pm, Categories: Links to Members Websites
Last Edited: 2008-03-09 14:52:10
For International Women's Day yesterday (7.3.08) I attended a poetry workshop which was held on my home town's Town Hall. It was facilitated by two local writers, Wendy Robinson and Avril Joy, who both work with women in a local prison, Wendy as Writer in Residence and Avril as English Tutor. They had worked on the theme with some of these women

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The theme of the workshop as The Mirror: A reflection on the experience of being a woman looking at poetry and prose from a number of famous women writers, Plath, Dickinson, Angelou etc. and the outcome could be either poetry or prose.

The scary thing about this workshop which made it most enjoyable was a session where we sat in pairs in front of makeup mirrors - fully illuminated - in the theatre dressing room and looked at ourselves as though we were strangers, making notes of what we saw. We then made notes about our paired writer and gifted these notes to them.
Using hand mirrors we then wrote notes about our profile view.

We aimed at five things noted for each section and then took these fifteen observations away with us and worked on either a poem or prose outcome. The finally worked outcomes are being collated by the organisers for distribution amongst the group and for wider distribution.

It was a very interesting exercise in observation and objectivity and engendered some very interesting discussion among the participants. With lunch and new friends made, it was a tenner very well and enjoyably spent.