The Writers’ Block has developed a programme of specialist Writers’ Rooms around specific genres. They support emerging writers working with experienced professional writers developing writing with a direct route to audiences. The Writers’ Block specialises in playfulness and collaborations across the art forms, with writing at its heart. This Writers’ Room is focussed on environmental poetry & creative non-fiction with John Wedgwood Clarke.
The Writers’ Block is seeking 3 emerging writers who are interested in developing their skills and practice around the genre of environmental poetry and creative non-fiction. There will be an opportunity to share the work through readings, printed postcards and some filmed assets.
Weather Station Poetry
Poetry is language’s weather station. A poem is full of hypersensitive measuring devices calibrated to pick up various feelings about the appearance of the first snowdrops, dreams, precise information about changes in the pH of the ocean, and all manner of anxieties entangled with the sometimes hard to comprehend scale of the climate and biodiversity crises.
We’ll be thinking about how poetry can hold these wildly different kinds of information together in a mutually illuminating way. We’ll make close readings of canonical and contemporary poems, critical and philosophical texts, our personal experiences and the environment around Bude to help us trace the way the climate and biodiversity crises are shaping our lives, and consider how poetry may offer us different ways of conceiving our relationship to the world that might just make a difference. We’ll get out into the local landscape and create new work on this theme.
Where: Neetside Community Centre, Leven Road, Bude, Cornwall EX23 8LB. We will also go out and about in Bude and coastline on foot.
The venue is fully accessible, and any access needs will be taken into account when planning outdoor work.
When: Tues 1st – Fri 4th April 2025 10am – 4pm.
John will lead 1st, 2nd and 4th April.
3rd April is independent writing time for you to develop your writing.
You must be available for all 4 days.
Bursary: You will receive £400 to attend the workshops, write new work and attend the sharing session. There is no extra funding for travel or accommodation, thus this a call for writers resident in Cornwall & Devon.
Access: The Writers’ Block actively encourages new and under-represented writers. Our venue is fully accessible.
How to apply:
Please send the following to [email protected] by 9am on Mon 3 March 2025
- An expression of interest saying why you want to be part of this Writers’ Room and how this fits with your ambitions and writing journey
- Examples of your work (3 poems or 3 short pieces of prose max)
- Confirmation that you are available for 1st – 4th April
Please send all of the above in a single word/pdf document attached to a email (not in the body of a email).
Successful applicants will be notified by 13 March.
The writer: John Wedgwood Clarke has published three collections of poems, Ghost Pot (Valley Press, 2013), Landfill (Valley Press, 2017) and Boy Thing (Arc, 2023), and various pamphlets, most recently Red River: At the Mouth (Field Notes, 2024) based on his research project Red River: Listening to a Polluted River (www.redriverpoetry.com). He has led many projects connected with the climate and biodiversity crisises, and his work has appeared in the Guardian, New Statesman, Poetry Review, Poetry London and PN Review and other places. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Exeter.
To find out more about The Writers’ Block visit www.thewritersblock.org.uk
If you have any queries please email [email protected]
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