'Slowness as a Bridge' / Creative Writing Workshop with Elgan Rhys

“If your grief was a river, how fast would it flow? Are you sitting by this riverbank, listening?”
(Rithika Pandey, "Questions from your Emissary Moth")

This autumn/winter, gentle/radical are offering a series of 5 creative writing workshops, as part of our Slowness as a Bridge project.

Slowness as a Bridge is a project working with 7 artists across Riverside, to include visual artist/painter Rithika Pandey. Rithika has created a brand new painting for Riverside, and her project invites residents across the neighbourhood to collectively host and steward this painting, household by household, a fortnight at a time, for months and years to come. As different households host and engage with the artwork in their own homes, the idea is for the painting to become a catalyst for conversations, gatherings, and creative explorations between neighbours.

Rithika's Publication
Alongside her painting, Rithika has produced a small printed publication titled Questions from your Emissary Month, touching on themes of grief, mourning, loss, memory, ancestry, the body, the earth, our human and non-human ecologies, and the healing potential of our present, and our future.

Creative Writing Workshops
We've invited 5 writers to host creative writing workshop that in different ways draw inspiration from Rithika's publication. They are Dylan Huw, Elgan Rhys, Rabab Ghazoul, Taz Rahman and Taylor Edmonds

(Note - workshop participants are not required to host Ritihika's painting to attend any of the creative writing workshops; the workshops will take their cue instead from Rithika's publication).

Workshop 4: Elgan Rhys
Through a series of creative prose writing prompts, this workshop will invite participants to consider the relationship between grief and friendship, via themes both in Rithika Pandey’s publication, as well as through the sharing of Elgan's own work.

Elgan Rhys is a Cardiff-based writer and collaborator, working bilingually across the theatre, screen and literary sectors. He is passionate about empowering the voices of young people, everyone in the LGBTQ+ umbrella and Welsh-speaking communities..

Sensitive Content
These workshops will touch on themes that may be sensitive or triggering for some (such as grief, or loss). To this end, we're working to create safe, sensitive, held spaces within these workshops, and we'll provide warnings of potentially triggering content in advance, and during each session. Each workshop leader will establish agreements with participants aimed to provide comfort, sensitivity, respectful conduct, boundaries and safety. We are working alongside our partners at Platfform to help us build spaces that feel safe, whilst acknowledging that definitions of 'safety' will inevitably vary for each individual

Tickets / A note on cost
This is a pay-what-you-can event. There is a basic £1 entry fee to the workshop if this is what people can afford. Otherwise we invite those who can pay more to do so, based on their means.