Photos and art of fern leaves against a grayish-blue background.

SBWN x IASH Nature Poetry Course for women and nonbinary writers of colour – 13 February 2022

If you prefer a PDF, you can download it here.

Our Time is a Garden: Nature Poetry Course

SBWN and Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) introduce a new, free online nature poetry course for women and nonbinary writers of colour based in Scotland.

Our Time is a Garden is a nature poetry course part of a research project led by Alycia Pirmohamed at the University of Edinburgh. Each session will be co-facilitated by artists and academics working within various areas of ecological writing.

The aim of this course is twofold: to nourish and develop participant writing skills, and to promote knowledge exchange by sharing interdisciplinary art and research. Dr Shari Sabeti (University of Edinburgh) will join the course, as a researcher of arts education, to explore how these sessions contribute to accessible learning, activism, and a sense of belonging or identity formation for participants.

We’re thrilled to announce that Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) CapildeoSamaneh Moafi, Amanda Thomson, Nina Mingya Powles, and Churnjeet Mahn will be co-facilitating workshops as part of this course!

Author photos of our co-facilitators. Top row: Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo, Samaneh Moafi, Nina Mingya Powles. Bottom row: Amanda Thomson, Churnjeet Mahn

Calendar

All workshops will take place on weekend mornings or on weekday evenings

Workshop 1 (Feb 13, 10-11:30am): Present, not Pristine: on colonialism’s erasures with Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo

Workshop 2 (Mar 5, 10-11:30am): On Forensic Architecture with Samaneh Moafi

Workshop 3 (April 9, 10-11:30am): On Small Bodies of Water with Nina Mingya Powles

Workshop 4 (May 25, 6-7:30pm): On A Scots Dictionary of Nature with Amanda Thomson

Workshop 5 (TBD): Queering postcolonial travel writing with Churnjeet Mahn

The Basics

  • This course is for women and nonbinary writers of colour at all levels of writing based in Scotland
  • All sessions will be held over Zoom with a maximum of 10 participants
  • There will be five 90-min sessions over four months (Feb – May 2022)
  • Each session will start with a 20-min presentation, reading, or talk from the co-facilitator
  • The rest of the session will be a writing workshop, though its structure may vary depending on the co-facilitator
  • This course will culminate in a (paid) public reading/exhibition, and hopefully publication (funding permitted)

Please Note

  • Registering means you will attend all sessions, so please only sign up if you can come to at least 4 workshops
    • You will receive session dates well in advance
  • To promote accessible knowledge exchange, the 20 minute presentations will be recorded and available to the general public
  • The workshop portion of each session will be closed to registered participants only

Details

  • There is a max of 10 spaces.
  • This event will be hosted online using Zoom (instructions will be sent to participants closer to the workshop date).
  • Our events are very popular and have a waitlist. If you have registered for a ticket but then are unable to attend please do let us know so we can offer it to another person on the waitlist. Thank you!
  • All SBWN events will adhere to our safer spaces policy. You can learn more about our policy here.

The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh is one of the world’s premier Institutes for Advanced Study. IASH supports innovative research and public engagement activities across the arts, humanities and social sciences.

The title ‘Our time is a garden’ comes from Sun Yung Shin’s Unbearable Splendor

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