Duration
Weekly two-hour sessions over three weeks
Location
Online via Zoom
Date and time
6.30–8.30 p.m. weekly on Monday evenings, 30 November to 14 December
Level
All experience levels welcome
Course Summary
This won’t be your usual game of Twenty Questions! In this short poetry course we will create poems inspired by moments where the natural world intersects with core memories. Each session will have its own theme: Animal, Vegetable and Mineral.
Every two-hour session will contain discussions, in-class exercises, group sharing and feedback. There will also be reading and writing tasks in between sessions.
Note: although this is a poetry course, writing can be poetry, prose poems, flash or fragments of memoir; whatever flows goes.
Course Outline
Week 1: Animal
In our first session we will talk about non-human creatures and how they are part of our life journeys, from the domestic to the wild. We might discuss the creatures themselves, what they symbolised or meant to us at the time, and the importance of their presence in the world in their own contexts. We will also look at how creatures might resonate with our own life journeys, for example through their migratory patterns or other behaviours.
Week 2: Vegetable
In our second session we will discuss plants, trees and the like, and the ways in which they both anchor our memories in space and are fleeting in their existence. From backyard trees to forest moss, we will think back to their presence in our personal histories and their relevance in wider contexts.
Week 3: Mineral
In our final session we will work through the strata of memory and our relationships with rocks, dirt, salt, sand and bog; stones that are raw or refined. We will move from the micro to the macro, from the pebbles in our palms to plate tectonics. In the final session there will be opportunity for reflections about the course and what happens next.
Course Outcomes
By the end of the course, participants will have created a small body of work, will have received feedback on their writing from the group, and will leave with prompts, ideas and inspiration to continue delving into memory through these themes.
About the Facilitator
Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan is an Indian-Irish writer, performer and cultural consultant. Her work has been published by New Island, Banshee, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland and others. She often works with poetry as a method of science communication and was the 2023 Writer in Residence for the Institute of Physics and a 2024 Goethe-Institut Studio Quantum Artist in Residence. She is a Skein Press Play it Forward Fellow, and her debut poetry collection The Salt of Something New was published with Dedalus Press this year.