I drove up into the Dandenong ranges earlyish on Sunday morning for my second poetry workshop of the weekend. This time it was Haiku in the Hills with AJ D'Costa, another Sonic Poetry Festival event which makes three in three days! I love poetry month – there's so many amazing things to do!!!
We all met up at the gazebo and then AJ took us through a beautifully curated and thought-out walk through the Dandenong Ranges Botanic Garden in Olinda. We stopped at various places along the way where AJ would give us some haiku theory/history/poems and a prompt for writing our own. As we walked between locations, she asked us to note down our observations which we then turned into haiku at the end. It's been a while since I've been in the hills and I had forgotten how chilly it gets, especially in the mornings at this time of year. Luckily we got moving and I soon warmed up.
At the very end of our walk, we stopped in a grassy meadow and spent some time working on our haiku in the sun. After that we had a picnic style lunch with pakoras, samosas, dips, veggie sticks, cheese, apricots, crackers, chai and iced tea – all carried in packs by AJ and Ady, her partner.
It was a brilliant morning and it's definitely in my top three of all time favourite workshops. It was the perfect combination of walking, writing, talking and eating. And I met so many lovely new people. Huge thanks to AJ and Red Room poetry who gave AJ a micro grant to run the workshop. Aj is an incredibly warm and generous person and donated all the profits for the day to PARA (Palestine Australia Relief & Action), supporting Palestinian refugees in Australia.