This year’s Metaphors for a Black Future programme considers how we might write through and with the body, and in embodied relationship with the earth. It is open to all Scotland-based writers, non-writers and artists of all experience levels, who are Black/from the African diaspora, including people of mixed heritage.
This includes a programme of free workshops and sharings that consider how we might write through and with the body and in embodied relationship with the earth.
We will not be prioritising the creation of finished pieces during the programme but will be inviting participants to share works-in-progress and never-to-be-heard-again-works at a sharing event in December.
You may sign up for one, several or all events – we hope to have a cohort of creatives join our full Metaphors for a Black Future programme.
Please find full details for each event and access info below.
Book now on Eventbrite
Please be mindful when booking. This is a workshop for Black/African diaspora writers based in Scotland (or who would normally be resident in Scotland, outside of COVID-19 circumstances).
Access
- All events are free.
- There is a max of 20 spaces at each workshop.
- All events are suitable for people 18+ years.
- Events are hosted online using Zoom (instructions will be sent 2 days before each event or can be accessed via the Eventbrite Online Event page).
- To participate you will need an internet/wi-fi connection and a desktop or mobile device to join by audio and/or video.
- BSL interpretation and/or live captioning provided on request during registration.
- Events over 2 hours long will have a comfort break in the middle. You may mute your mic/switch off video or take a break at any time.
- Please add any access requirements to the registration form.
- All SBWN events will adhere to our safer spaces policy. You can learn more about our policy here.
My body takes possession of time
Martha Adonai Williams
2 October, 11:30am-1pm
Please be mindful when booking. This event is for Scotland-based writers, non-writers and artists of all experience levels, who are Black/from the African diaspora, including people of mixed heritage.
In this workshop we will explore the themes that have shaped Metaphors for a Black Future: To the body, to the earth; embodied writing practice, taking inspiration from nature and writing in connection with the earth. In particular, we will consider different ways of conceptualising origin and tradition, thinking of these not as a static moment in the past but as something we renew and remake in the present. In particular, we will play with Norse and Celtic mythology, rewriting these stories through a Black diasporic lens.
There will be opportunities to write in any form you feel most drawn to at the time, short readings and moments to share. All the activities are an invitation that you can choose to participate in or not, depending on what feels comfortable for you.
About Martha
Martha Adonai Williams is a writer, facilitator, producer, community organiser, black feminist and friend. Her practice departs to and returns from black feminist world-making, always, with regular layovers in front of trash tv or at the allotment. Her work considers the wilderness and margins as sites of resistance, refusal and homecoming. She works with writing and storytelling as therapeutic tools and as methods for community building. Her recent work has been shown as part of Fringe of Colour films and published in MAP magazine. She runs call&response black feminist writing community, programmes for Glasgow Zine Library and curates SBWN’s annual Metaphors for a Black Future programme.
Dream Bodies Pt. 2
Clementine E Burnley
26 October, 7-8:30pm
Please be mindful when booking. This event is for Scotland-based writers, non-writers and artists of all experience levels, who are Black/from the African diaspora, including people of mixed heritage.
Continuing on from last year’s Dream Bodies workshop, that can only be described as pure magic, Clementine E Burnley returns to offer part two.
The Body is a central location for discussion and sometimes for judgement. How the Body looks, who’s looking, how the Body works. In this workshop we will invite each other to experience what being a Body is like. After a brief introduction to psychotherapist Arnold Mindell’s work on the Dreambody, we will do exercises to sharpen our awareness of our own bodies. Particular qualities, images, sensations, can come up when we pay attention to what’s happening inside us. What might our bodies have to say to us? How might dreams, and intuition appear in body experiences?
About Clementine
Clementine E Burnley is a feminist migrant mother, writer and community organiser. She lives in Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in Parabola Magazine, the National Flash Fiction Anthology and The Centifictionist. She’s an alumnus of Obsidian Foundation, Sky Arts Award Winner 2021, and a 2021 Edwin Morgan Second Life Grantee.
Twitter @decolonialheart, or IG @Ewokila
Preferred Pronouns: She, her, hers
Listening with the Body: A workshop in Hauntology
Ashanti Harris
Throughout October
Sign up here:
https://tinyletter.com/tothebody
Please be mindful when booking. This event is for Scotland-based writers, non-writers and artists of all experience levels, who are Black/from the African diaspora, including people of mixed heritage.
This is an invitation to explore and redefine our relationship to our bodies and the environments we move through, considering the many layers of narratives which intersect and overlap with our own experiences.
The workshop will take the form of instructional audio recordings you will receive via email, which you are invited to follow in your own time. The audio recordings will guide you through a series of body awareness exercises and movement provocations, some made to be experienced in your home and some made to be experienced whilst walking in a place of your choosing. You will then be invited to reflect and respond to these experiences in writing.
Collectively in our individual locations we will move towards an understanding of the body as an archive of memory, experience and knowledge and a tool for listening to our surroundings. Welcoming all forms and expressions of identity and experiences, we will begin from wherever we all are.
Required materials: All audio will be available to stream from SoundCloud.
- Session 1 – Speakers and a device such as a computer or laptop with access to SoundCloud.
- Session 2 – Headphones and a portable device to listen to the audio on SoundCloud whilst walking.
- Session 3 – A clear, safe and private space where you feel comfortable to move.
About Ashanti
Ashanti Harris is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher based in Glasgow. Working with dance, performance, facilitation, film, installation and writing, Ashanti’s work disrupts historical narratives and reimagines them from a Caribbean diasporic perspective. As part of her creative practice, she is co-director of the dance company Project X – platforming dance of the African and Caribbean diaspora in Scotland; and works collaboratively as part of the collective Glasgow Open Dance School (G.O.D.S) – facilitating experimental movement workshops and research groups. She is also lecturer in Contemporary Performance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and co-facilitates the British Art Network research group The Re-Action of Black Performance alongside artist and curator, Sabrina Henry.
Recent commissions and exhibitions include: JUMBIES, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2021); This Woman’s Work, Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami (2021); Radio Space, Borealis Festival, Bergen (2021); Miraculous Noise, Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg (2021); OHCE, Radiophrenia, 87.9fm (2020); Being Present, OGR, Torino (2020); In The Open, The Common Guild, Glasgow (2020); The Index Impulse, Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick (2020); Pre-Ramble, David Dale, Glasgow (2020); The Skeleton of a Name, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2019); Second Site, Civic Room, Glasgow (2019); Walking Through the Shadows Eyes Open, SUBSOLO Laboratório de Arte, Sao Paolo, (2019).
To the earth
Amanda Thomson
Throughout November
Sign up here:
https://tinyletter.com/totheearth
Please be mindful when booking. This event is for Scotland-based writers, non-writers and artists of all experience levels, who are Black/from the African diaspora, including people of mixed heritage.
Join Amanda for a series of emailed writing prompts to get us thinking about who we are, how we move through place, and who we are in the landscape. These will be about noticing what’s around you, thinking about what’s within, and how we might bring certain aspects of ourselves together.
Register to receive these via email during November.
About Amanda
Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer who is also a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. She makes a lot of work in and about the Highlands of Scotland. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in The Willowherb Review, Gutter, for the online Aerial Festival; the anthology Antlers of Water, Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, edited by Kathleen Jamie; The Wild Isles, An Anthology of the Best British and Irish Nature Writing, edited by Patrick Barkham, and Gifts of Gravity and Light, An Almanac for the 21st Century, edited by Pippa Marland and Anita Roy. Recent commissions include an audio essay for BBC Radio 4. She earned her doctorate in interdisciplinary arts practice, based around the landscapes and the forests of the North of Scotland, in 2013. She lives and works in Strathspey, in the Scottish Highlands, and Glasgow. Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, is published by Saraband Books; and a collaboration with Elizabeth Reeder, microbursts, a collection of lyric and intermedial essays on care and grief, was published by Prototype Publishing in February 2021. She is currently working on her second book.
when de memory came <3 // a writing, water and memory well
Lateisha Lovelace-Hanson
10 November, 6:30-8pm
Please be mindful when booking. This event is for Scotland-based writers, non-writers and artists of all experience levels, who are Black/from the African diaspora, including people of mixed heritage.
This is an invitation to connect and be held through the sacred power of water – creating a ‘writing well’. Enabling feelings, thoughts and memories to come to the surface. This workshop is inspired by experiences and themes written in Lateisha’s new play WHEN DE MEMORY CAME <3 <3 <3 – the third text in their EARTH BELONGING // fi wi de Black earth future series.
“Definitions of Well (Merriam Webster Dictionary)
- to rise to the surface and usually flow forth
- a pit or hole sunk into the earth to reach a supply of water
- a source from which something may be drawn as needed
- to an extent approaching completeness
- completely cured or healed”
Working with:
- water energy practice
- meditation and gentle movement
- writing / poetry prompts
- shared readings and stimulus
How do we honour waters of new life and creation?
How do we honour waters of grief and mourning?
How do we breathe through and beyond waves of transatlantic/transoceanic memory?
How do we birth ourselves into our futures?
How do we undrown and come to the surface of self?
How do we well up, release and channel soft seas?
About Lateisha
Lateisha is a multidisciplinary artist: writer, actor, theatre maker, somatic practitioner and facilitator of Jamaican heritage.
Moving across intersections of race, health, gender, queerness, class, earth-belonging nature ecologies to illuminate pathways we need to live, love and thrive through and beyond oppression towards liberation.
Lateisha has an embodied and interconnected approach – unearthing and sharing playful, critical and healing tools to create spaces of intimacy, collective care and transformation through art-facilitation as social justice.
Lateisha is currently artist-in-residence at Arts Admin’s ‘Apocalypse Reading Room’ at Toynbee Studios. The project is an on-site library curated by Ama Josephine Budge: a world of talking stories in the face of environmental and social transformation.
Lateisha enjoys swimming in open-water, tending to what grows and plant-based nurturing/futuring.
Within each moment, we are all these different layers of being, at the same time
Sheree Mack
21 November, 11:30am-1pm
Please be mindful when booking. This event is for Scotland-based writers, non-writers and artists of all experience levels, who are Black/from the African diaspora, including people of mixed heritage.
In this workshop we will invoke palimpsests – composite surfaces, sutured landscapes, seamed memories and layered absence and presence.
Just as within the landscape there is a layering of different landforms, reflecting different timeframes and influences, so too within our bodies there are layers of identities built upon over time and space, histories and legacies.
Let’s spend some time imaginatively walking through the landscape, connecting with nature at the same time as connecting with ourselves. Let’s peel back the layers within to explore our essence, our burning cores and all that fuels them; belonging, ancestral wisdom, race, justice, trauma, nature and healing.
You are invited to write in any form you desire, creating a multi-layered record of your experiences. Using free-writes, prompts, readings and discussion, you are invited to dwell within the palimpsests we create and share embracing permission to go where the writing takes you, walking your own path in community with joy.
About Sheree
Sheree Mack is a Creatrix with a practice which manifests through poetry, storytelling, image & the unfolding histories of Black people. She engages audiences around Black women’s voices & bodies, Black feminism, ecology & memory. She facilitates national & international creative workshops & retreats in the landscape, encouraging & supporting women on their journey of remembrance back to their bodies & authentic selves.
Through a National Heritage Lottery Funded project, Sheree offers opportunities for disadvantaged Black women & girls within the North-East region of England to be with/in nature. She is the creator and host of The Earth Sea Love Podcast, which aims to amplify women of colour, our voices & relationships with nature.
IG: @shereemackwrites/ @earthsealove
Website: https://livingwildstudios.com
Podcast: https://earthsealove.com
Metaphors for a Black Future: Sharings
9 December, 7-8:30pm
Invite-only
Writers and invited guests will gather online to share, listen and respond to work created in and in response to the Metaphors for a Black Future 2021 programme, To the body, to the earth.
