Date/Time
Date(s) - Mon 4th Sep - Sat 9th Sep, 2023
All Day
Location
Moniack Mhor, Kiltarlity, Inverness-shire , IV4 7HT
Poetry as Memoir
Using life story, narrative, magical realism, and witness, Hannah and Joelle will show you how to create poetry that is passionate, political, and personal.
Over this course of the week, you will be disrupting form, exploring performance poetics, and finding your voice and the vital thing you want to say. This is poetry as challenge, as revolution, as belonging.
Hannah Lavery is a Scottish poet and playwright. She was appointed Edinburgh Makar (or poet laureate) in November 2021 for a three year term. Her poetry pamphlet Finding Seaglass was published by Stewed Rhubarb and her debut collection Blood Salt Spring was published in 2022 by Polygon and was shortlisted for the 2022 Saltire Scottish National Poetry Book Award. She has been selected for the Scottish Best Poem twice, in 2019 with her poem Scotland You’re No Mine and in 2021, with her poem Flying Bats. Her plays have included the highly acclaimed autobiographical lyric play The Drift (National Theatre of Scotland), Lament for Sheku Bayoh (Edinburgh International Festival), and Protest!, produced by Fuel Theatre in association with Imaginate, Northern Stage and National Theatre of Scotland, will premiere in 2023.
She is an experienced workshop facilitator and won a Leadership Award from Creative Edinburgh for her work with Writers of Colour and her curated film poetry series Sorry I am on Mute for Fringe of Colour. In 2022, she launched with Scottish Feminist Theatre Company, Stellar Quines, a feminist arts podcast called Quines Cast, which she co-hosts with Caitlin Skinner.
Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet and author who prior to the pandemic completed a world tour with her collection Songs My Enemy Taught Me. She founded SLAMbassadors, the UK national youth poetry slam championships, as well as the international spoken-word project Borderlines. She is widely anthologised, the author of 4 collections of poetry and is currently completing her debut collection of inter-connecting short stories The Night Alphabet. Her new poetry collection C+NTO & Othered Poems was published in June 2021 and is the subject of the Radio 4 arts documentary Butch. C+NTO has been shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize 2021, been named by The Telegraph, the New Statesman, The White Review & Times Literary Supplement as one of the best poetry books of 2021, as well as DIVA magazine’s Book of the Month, and awarded 5 stars by the Morning Star. She has received a Changemaker Award from the Southbank Centre, a Fellowship of the RSA, and her poem Valentine was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize. She is a co-curator and host of Out-Spoken Live, the UK’s premier poetry and music club currently resident at the Southbank Centre. She is the commissioning editor at Out-Spoken Press 2020-2022.
William Letford published his first collection of poetry while working as a roofer. Since then, his work has been adapted into film, projected onto buildings, carved into monuments, adapted for the stage, cast out over the radio, and performed by orchestras. He has helped restore a Medieval village in the mountains of Northern Italy, taught English in Japan, fished with his bare hands in Indonesia, been invited to perform in Iraq, South Korea, Lebanon, Australia, Germany, India, Poland, and many more countries.
Fees
The full fee for this course is £650. This includes your accommodation in a single room with shared bathroom, all meals, hot drinks and snacks from Monday afternoon until Saturday morning, and your tuition. For more information about the practicalities of our courses and retreats, please visit our About the Courses page.
A limited number of en-suite rooms are available for a £50 surcharge, and a limited number of Twin Room places are available at a discounted price of £600 per person. When booking a Twin Room place, please tell us in the comments box which gender you are and which gender(s) you are comfortable sharing a room with. This information will remain confidential.
A deposit is required to secure your place, which is non-refundable after a 14-day cooling-off period. The balance payment of £500 is due six weeks before the course begins. If you would like to pay the full amount earlier than this or at the point of booking, please call our booking office on 01463 592 828 or email info@moniackmhor.org.uk.
Please let us know if you have any access requirements, for example a ground floor bedroom and / or access to a wheelchair-accessible shower room. For more information about access to our courses, please visit our Access page.
Bookings
This event is fully booked. Please email info@moniackmhor.org.uk to be added to the waiting list.