Our Time is a Garden, v. 2: 2-Day Online Nature Poetry Course

Overview

On 1^st-2^nd February, SBWN will be hosting its first of a series of short courses: a 2-day programme on the theme of nature poetry.

This programme is a revised edition of Our Time is a Garden, which first ran as a series of nature poetry sessions for women and nonbinary writers in partnership with IASH in 2022.

The aim of this short course is twofold: to nourish and develop participant writing skills, and to promote knowledge exchange by sharing interdisciplinary art and research. Over the course of a weekend, attendees will enjoy welcoming sessions for writers at all levels. The course will include presentations on new and exciting environmental art and research projects, reading and discussion of nature poetry, generative workshops and writing prompts, and time to share your own writing with the group.

We are thrilled to be collaborating for this short course with fieldnotes collective (Nina Mingya Powles, Jessica J Lee, Pratyusha, and Alycia Pirmohamed), who will join us on Sunday 2^nd February for a nature writing workshop on collaborative writing.

You can download a PDF of this course information here.

Schedule

Saturday 1^st February, 2025

• 10-10:30am: Welcome & check-in
• 10:30am-12pm: Presentations on new environmental art & research projects
• 12pm-1pm: Lunch break
  
• 1pm-2:30pm: Generative writing session with prompts
  

Sunday 2nd February, 2025

• 9am-12pm: Collaborative workshop run by fieldnotes collective
• 12pm-1pm: Lunch break
• 1pm-2pm: Space to share work with participants

The Basics

• This course is for writers of colour based in Scotland at all levels of writing.
• All sessions will be held over Zoom with a maximum of 30 participants.
• All sessions are mandatory, so please only register if you can attend both days of the short course. If this poses a barrier in terms of access, caring responsibilities, or access to the internet, please get in touch. Modifications and various bursaries are available.
• Sessions longer than an hour will include a comfort break.
• This course has a suggested donation of £20, but please register for free or for a smaller amount if that suits your needs. No questions asked.
• Registering for this course means you agree to our safer spaces policy.
• Live captions provided by Otter.

Session info

Presentations: SBWN will share eco-poetry, and other ecological projects and research, and facilitate discussion around them. This is in order to prompt thinking, language, and inspiration for later writing.

Generative writing session: A writing session to synthesise what was gleaned from the presentations earlier. Hopefully the presentations will have inspired some new thinking or questions that writers can explore in this session.

Collaborative workshop: This workshop on ‘body, self, place, and community’ will be run by fieldnotes collective. Writers will explore methods for generating immersive, sensory texts that draw the reader in, while asking how we can move beyond sole authorship towards a more community-minded understanding of creative writing.

Sharing space: A place to share writing and reflections about the short course with participants and facilitators. This space will remain private to attendees only.

About fieldnotes collective

fieldnotes collective are an international collective of four writers and poets (Nina Mingya Powles, Jessica J Lee, Pratyusha, and Alycia Pirmohamed) working in the nature writing space, experimenting with collaborative forms of writing and other ways of extending the boundaries of nature writing. Through the support of a Creative Scotland Four Nations Fund grant, we published a collaborative hybrid writing project on weather titled this too is a glistening. In our own individual practices we often explore our relationship to the environment through the lens(es) of migration, language, and embodiment.