Seeing Nature with Sarah Day

A poetry workshop for 17 and 18-year-olds

who would like to understand more about poetry and nature. 

You may never have written a poem, or you may want to improve your poems and make them more accessible to a wider readership; or, you may be an avid reader of poetry and want to learn more about the powerful effect poems can have on you. Everyone is welcome to this session. 
People have been writing about nature for a long time in different cultures. Through time, they have expressed widely different understandings of what nature is. Some people observe nature, some people are at home in nature; for some, nature might be seen as the enemy. Perhaps your view of nature reflects the times we live in? You will have the opportunity to talk about and write poems that observe and celebrate nature, or poems that express concern for nature, or poems that use nature as metaphor to say something else entirely.

Through a series of short exercises, I will encourage you to let your poems lead you to your subject matter. 

If you would like to bring a drafted poem relating to nature, I will try to make time to talk about it on the day.

(You might produce something in this workshop that you would like to submit to the  national Dorothea McKellar Poetry Competition whose topic this year is: ‘All the beautiful things’!)

Sarah Day was born in England and grew up in Tasmania. Awards for her books include the Judith Wright Calanthe Queensland Premier’s, the Judith Wright ACT, the University of Melbourne Wesley Michelle Wright Prize and the Anne Elder Award. In 2002 her New and Selected Poems was published by Arc in UK. It was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Awards and received a UK Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Sarah has been resident at the BR Whiting Library in Rome, has read at writers’ festivals around Australia and been a guest at the Festival de Poesie in Paris in 2001 and 2006, at King’s Lynn in England 2002 and 2017, and University of Lisbon 2011. Sarah’s poems have been set to music by British composer Anthony Gilbert. Sarah was poetry editor of Island Magazine for seven years, teaches English and Creative Writing and has been a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. In 2017, her story In the Dark won the Alan Marshall Short Story Competition.

This workshop is free of charge, thanks to the support of the Tasmanian Department of Premier and Cabinet.