The Centre for Stories in Northbridge Western Australia has the best library I've ever seen. When I walked into the building to check out the space before doing my poetry workshop for the Perth Poetry Festival, I fell in love with this room. It's so fabulous that I wanted to move in! They said I could come back and hang out at any time but unfortunately I was so busy with all things Perth Poetry Festival that I didn't get the chance.
I did however return to the Centre for Stories over the weekend to attend all the poetry workshops for the Festival and to host my own workshop, Beyond Words A Liminal Spaces Workshop. The idea behind the workshop was to get people thinking and writing differently by using movement, sound and senses to tap into other areas of the brain. I used games I learnt as a nature connection mentor for the rewinding group, Firekeepers along with meditation and drawing exercises. I followed these up with prompts that used techniques of point of view, collage and personification.
I was worried that I would run out of exercises and prompts for the workshop so I prepared eight prompts just in case. When planning a workshop it's hard to know exactly how long things will take. Once you take into account interaction, discussion and sharing of poems, it becomes a piece of string that can be short or long. I'd thought that we would get six prompts done in the two hours and had planned an extra two, just in case… We ended up doing three of the prompts which leaves me five that can become new workshops for the future. See, nothing gets wasted, not even workshop plans and outlines!
I had a couple of learnings from the worksop. The first writing prompt was for five minutes. One of the participants wrote a very funny poem about the impossibility of doing the set task in five minutes. As a result I extended the writing time for the subsequent prompts (and felt quite proud of myself for being flexible and adapting the workshop on the fly!). The other feedback was that the movement exercise wasn't accessible for people of limited mobility. In future when running this workshop I will make sure that there are chairs people can sit on for this exercise.
Seventeen people came to the workshop and I had some great feedback with one participant saying that the exercises had got them thinking differently. Someone else said that the workshop had helped them write lots of poems and overcome their writer's block. And another person told me that it was the best poetry workshop they had been to recently. All in all I think the workshop was a success.
Seventeen people turned up for my poetry workshop, Beyond Words, A liminal Spaces workshop.