30 May at Trebah: Our Friends from the North

This event promises to be a real feast of poetry. It features two poets based in the north, Pat Borthwick and Lyn Moir, and one, Chris Considine, who has just moved to Plymouth after living for many years in Swaledale.

The day starts with...

Food for Thought Poetry Workshop, with Pat Borthwick
in The Vinery, 10.00-12.30

Based on the gastronomical works of American writer MFK Fisher (How to Cook a Wolf  & Consider the Oyster) this workshop is designed to unlock your memory and imagination and develop confidence to experiment with different ways of writing poems. You’ll be encouraged to consider how our approach to food changes through the different stages of our lives and how it is never experienced as a single sensation but one subtly woven with the threads of time, place, and people.

The session will be made up of short introductory exercises with close reading and discussion of published models.  From these, you will be encouraged to develop a longer piece of writing.  There will then be time for a readback/ feedback session, leaving participants with ‘food for thought’ to apply to future writing.

This workshop is suitable for all dietary needs and levels of experience.

And it's followed by…

Reading with Pat Borthwick, Chris Considine and Lyn Moir, plus open mic, at Alice’s Seat (weather permitting, otherwise in The Vinery) from 2.00pm

Pat Borthwick is published by Templar and is finalising her fourth full-length collection.  She has been a creative writing tutor for Leeds University, the Open College of Arts and has run courses at Arvon. She has a reputation for her sparkling workshops.
Pat has many first prizes to her name including the Amnesty International Human Rights Prize, the Blue Nose Poet of the Year Award, the Italian Silver Wyvern and the Anglo-Canadian Petra Kenney. She won the prestigious Keats-Shelley Poetry Award in 2011 and has just received a second International Writers Hawthornden Fellowship.

Billy Collins describes her work as being ‘the real business’.

Chris Considine is a poet and former school-teacher who lived for many years in Swaledale, North Yorkshire, before moving to Plymouth in 2011. Her publications include St. Cuthbert and Bystanders (Redbeck Press, 2001) and Swaledale Sketchbook (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2002) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in the best first collection category in 2002. Her first full collection, Learning to Look, was published by Peterloo Poets in 2003, followed by Quarll, also from Peterloo, in 2006. Behind the Lines was published by Cinnamon Press in 2011.

At the beginning of 2004 she was a Hawthornden Fellow.

Lyn Moir has published collections with Arrowhead in 2001 and 2003. Calder Wood Press published Easterly, Force 10 in 2009 and her fourth, Velázquez’s Riddle, early in 2011. She lives in St. Andrews, on the harbour. She is working on a fifth collection.

Cost for the day:  £12.00
Contact Moira Andrew: moira.andrew@uwclub.net