Workshops | Robyn Rowland

Eleven Writing workshops with Dr Robyn Rowland AO

Each workshop involves a talk and discussion of poems, a reflective moment, followed by writing towards the topic and feedback for each participant. Each participant is given notes to keep which relate to the theme as well as copies of Robyn’s and other works.

Topic number 1 is usually incorporated into one-day workshops using the topics 2 to 8, unless it is used for writers just beginning their work in poetry/prose.

1. Sweet Words: Valuing the Particular.

It is often difficult to find a way into the poem we want to write and to bring to it a sense of the immediate. Beginning in the particular, we can watch an organic growth occur, gaining nurture from colour, scent, sound, taste and touch. In these particulars lie the story, the poem ready to unfold. This workshop will help you to uncover it, to shape it.

The workshop begins with a talk by Robyn on her own use of the ‘the particular’, analysing her poetry and some prose. It then moves into a guided moment encouraging participants to attend and to observe the particular, within a specific framework of their own personal history. Two exercises for the writing of your workshop piece follow, which we will then hear and discuss constructively.

This workshop is appropriate for, and has been successfully conducted with, established and early writers; poets and prose writers.

2. War and Poetry: what is their common language?

More than in any other war, during World War I, poets, painters, musicians, photographers, fought, died, created and suffered as men (mainly) joining in the ‘ordinary’ life of war. They knew little of the impact of war’s new mechanisation; less again of the politics which drove it. Poetry was initially written in romanticised support of the war; later with deep disillusionment by those who survived.

In ‘What is found there’, poet Adrienne Rich wrote:

War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.

War is antagonistic to life in all its forms. But art is not. Through music, the written word, through poetry, life reiterates its generative values; that nobility and morality are also part of our humanity and are not destroyed by war.

This workshop will focus in 2015 on World War I, its poetry, art and music. It considers how landscape is unfurled in art and the impact of art as propaganda. Participants will write about either their relationship to the war or their reactions to it. Part of this discussion involves how history can become creative writing. We will consider poetry from ‘war poets’ like Rubert Brooke, women war poets of the First World War, and poems from Robyn’s own work in This Intimate War. Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 – Içli Dışlı Bir Savaş. Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915 , with Turkish translator Mehmet Ali Çelikel.

3. Living flames - Burning Words. A workshop with Fire.

From brushfires, to bog fires, through the flame of the holy spirit to the pagan fires of solstice, fire has been both warm companion and feared and capricious renegade.The elements of fire, water, earth and air are primal sources of inspiration and image. This workshop explores the nature of fire in its many forms, the relationship of fire to feeling, the transformative and destructive power of fire, and its use in ritual.

Photographic material relating to Australian bush fires is explored. Robyn will also explore the use of fire in her own work as examples. This workshop focuses on the emerging meaning of fire and the flame for each writer.

The workshop begins with a talk by Robyn on her own use of the ‘the particular’, analysing her poetry and some prose. It then moves into a guided moment followed by writing towards the topic, a period of writing, and feedback for each participant on their work in terms of the topic set. Each participant is given notes to keep relating to the topic for each workshop, as well as copies of Robyn’s or other poems which exemplify themes.

This workshop can be appropriate for and has been successfully conducted with, established and early writers; poets and prose writers.

4. Slán abhaile (safe home). Leaving home - finding home.

Writing out the experience of exile, emigration, immigration and belonging.

This workshop considers the histories of emigration and immigration. It covers the meaning of land, people and spiritual practice and what those losses involve, particularly the loss of language. Issues involved in arriving in a new land are considered, and firmly relate to the reasons for departure. Robyn’s work is used as an example of the experience of a third generation Irish Australian. But the work of other poets such as Eavan Boland and Vincent Buckley, and prose writers Arnold Zable and Eva Sallis will also be canvassed.

The workshop is relevant to past, but also current, issues of the immigration to Ireland and Australia of other nationalities. It involves a talk by Robyn and discussion of her work and other poets/writers, a guide through the particulars of poetry, and the creation of a piece of work, followed by detailed feedback.

It is useful to participants if they can bring an item relating to the topic, e.g. photos, a piece of lace, music, trinkets, which they can use in an experiential moment within the workshop.

NB Each participant is given notes to keep relating to the topic for each workshop, as well as copies of Robyn’s or other poems which exemplify themes. Each workshop involves a talk, followed by writing towards the topic and feedback for each participant.

5. Ocean, river, tear: water in flood and famine

A poetry/prose workshop on water; its practical and mythical significance. From the smallest droplet to the greatest ocean, water is the building block of life. Inside us - bodies made primarily of water - tears release emotion, water ensures survival. As an image, it flows through the great poetry of Buddhism, the Bible and poetry of those who connect inner life with nature. This workshop takes the elemental nature of water and encourages its various representations in our work.

6. Landscapes of the self

J M Synge wrote: ‘It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.’

This topic emerges out of a love of place, and the way landscape can both be represented in poetry as realism, as well as the way it can become come to represent interior life, including the emotional and spiritual landscape. Finding entry, finding a way into landscape, is a challenge taken up in this workshop. How to become the land or seascape itself.

7. Digging the past into the present: the archaeology of writing.

The processes of writing are often like an archaeological dig and use similar processes: turning over artefacts, considering stratification, piecing together fragments, blowing away the dust of memory. Narratives emerge in archaeology to explain the material finds and so too is creative writing a project of story telling. This workshop will consider some writers’ use of archaeology to create a present message or memory. We will also consider some specific finds e.g the bog bodies, the Peruvian finds, Troy and the Minoan civilization. Participants will be encouraged to begin with a specific find/place and generate their own history/ narrative into it and weave their own ‘find’ out of it.

Each participant will be given notes to keep relating to the topic , as well as copies of Robyn’s or other poems which exemplify themes. The workshop involves a talk, followed by a guided reflective moment, time for writing towards the topic and finally individual feedback in the group for each participant.

8. Silence & its dialects

Music is enhanced by its necessary partner, silence. So too, the forms of poetry and of prose need space to breathe. Writing comes out of silence and returns to it, leaving a trace. In living, silence is both the shadow and the light. Meditation and prayer enter silence and carry it. In relationships, silence can be the threat of rejection; represent the loneliness of despair. Is our voice carried into absence? Secret-keeping arises too from silence and families are involved in shrouding truth. Deafness brings silence but what are the differences between this silence and peace? This workshop will discuss the many shapes of silence.

9. Sculpting our writing. Learning our craft.

Michelangelo was 25 when he created David out of a piece of imperfect/flawed marble that no-one wanted. It took him two years. Some say the dimensions are imperfect. Does it matter? Can an imperfect thing be a creation of perfection? Often, writing is like cutting away the excess marble – that the thing was always there waiting to be revealed. Sometimes it is made from layering of mistake after mistake until the pieces of a puzzle slide into place.

Knowing the difference between that god-given piece and the one which needs to be laboured over, is part of the practice of writing. Learning self-editing is part of our apprenticeship.

This workshop deals with the ways in which we can learn to self-edit. Unlike other workshops I teach, it requires the participants to bring two pieces of work which need editing so we can discuss flaws. It will also involve looking at some drafts of other poets and how they rearranged their work before the final piece was finished.

10. Journeys: shaping body, spirit and world.

The great Persian Sufi poet Rumi wrote:

Journeys bring power and love back into you. If you can't go somewhere, move in the passageways of the self. They are like shafts of light, always changing, and you change when you explore them.

From the first ancient travel writers in the 8^th BC, through the finest of poets and travel writers of today, movement into the world allows us to see others in their original sense and to feel ourselves for who we really are. Journeys are undertaken through curiosity or necessity; with urgency or with the delight of ‘no hurry’. Many of us are in constant motion, roving through place and time. To have travelled, opens life, brings excitement and understanding. In movement, whether by foot, camel, sea, train or plane, we are shaped by the world and we in return shape it. Journeys take on different natures: external into the excitement of culture, landscape and language; or internal into the nature of spirit and self.

In this workshop we will explore the many forms of journeying and what happens when we engage with it.

11. Forests: ‘lovely, dark and deep’; light, airy and high.

Trees and the intertwined nature of growth and decay

Dante wrote in the Divine Comedy: ‘Midway through this life of ours I found myself alone in a dark wood’ yet Alfred Joyce Kilmer could serve in war and write ‘I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree.’ Jeanette Winterson the novelist writes: Exploring the nature of forests we can find metaphors for poems, stories for prose. There are things hidden; things uncovered. There is the process of beginning and of decay.

Forests represent many things to us: safety and lost-ness; ways of hiding or the need for boats and fire. Homes are built inside them and from them. From threat to comfort, our feelings associated with forests are part of both heart and body memory. Stories are held in the tress and in the mythology that is attached to them. Irish poetry and song consistently celebrates trees. Half of the letters of the ancient Irish Ogham Alphabet take their names from trees while place names echo their relevance, particularly that of the oak.

This workshop will journey through forests and trees, exploring our personal attachments to them, and their meaning for each of us.