You see, women are multitaskers because we’ve always adapted | to changes in estrogen during the many stages of our lives, | during the various stages of each month, during every minute | of every day. Our body is always doing something with hormones | while it does something else with a ladle or spade, | a phone or a car, a computer, a baby, a book. From ‘Some Questions I Ask Myself When I Cannot Sleep’ If this poem resonates, then this workshop is for you.
This inclusive and caring session is for women who want to explore the body in flux and its consequences. It gives you the time, space and guidance to write poems, fiction or non-fiction about ‘the change’ without euphemisms and platitudes.
Bring pen and paper or a fully charged device to participate in the writing exercises.
Note: This course was designed to explore writing about perimenopause and menopause under the guidance of Heather Taylor Johnson, who has written extensively on these subjects.
You will learn:
- How to be uninhibited regarding medical and slang terminology and using it to its fullest potential in your writing
- How to be fearless about writing what ‘shouldn’t’ be talked about and discover what embodied writing really means
- How to measure what might seem like shock and horror through real, human discourse, looking to examples in poetry, fiction and nonfiction
- How to build community through words
- How to use writing to cope with bodily changes
About the tutor:
Heather Taylor-Johnson writes on Kaurna land, where she received an Arts Fellowship to write essays on the body in states of transition. Her just-released poetry collection is I Lost Someone Then Found Them in My Body. Her work has won or been shortlisted in the Readings Prize for New Fiction, ABR’s Calibre Prize, Island’s Nonfiction Prize and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. She’s the editor of Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain.
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