1-5pm, 3 May 2023
Nottingham Trent University
As part of the ‘Ecological Imaginaries: A Research Network Development Symposium’ taking place at Nottingham Trent University on 3 May, the Critical Poetics Research Group will be hosting two creative-critical workshops exploring ecological crisis, climate change and embodiment in the world. Participants will be invited to respond to the workshops through creative, critical or hybrid forms. There will be opportunities to share your research interests and to reflect on how workshop activities intersect with your own critical research and/or creative practice.
Rachel Bower: ‘Writing the Miniature’
This workshop considers the potential and limitations of the miniature in thinking about ecological crisis and climate change. We will discuss a range of short texts and ask how close attention to the particular, the small, or the local might offer us ways of cultivating connection, seeking agency and honouring the specificity of the natural world.
Dr Rachel Bower is the author of two poetry collections and a non-fiction book on literary letters. Her poems and stories have been published widely in literary magazines including The London Magazine, The White Review, Magma and Stand.
Helen Jukes: ‘The Porous Body’
Working with a range of short texts by poets, novelists, philosophers and scientists, this workshop will ask what it means to be born into inherently leaky frames, and how as writers we might put words to a body and an experience of being in the world that is radically open, leaky and mutable.
Helen Bower’s A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings was listed as a Book of the Year by Landlines Nature, as Book of the Month in BBC Countryfile, and as Book of the Week at the London Review of Books. It was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag non-fiction award. Her writing on the environment has appeared widely in the New York Times, Aeon, BBC Wildlife and LITRO.
Workshops are free and open to all. Places are limited so early booking is advised. For more information or to register for the workshops, please email sarah.jackson02@ntu.ac.uk by 24 April.
The workshops will be followed by a Nottingham Creative Writing Hub event at Five Leaves Bookshop featuring readings by Rachel and Helen, along with NTU students Helena Hunter and Annie Cross. To register for the reading, please visit https://nottinghamcreativewritinghub.com/events/