Unfortunately, we are no longer able to offer this workshop. Registration has been closed.
Marlene Creates, award-winning environmental artist and poet, is coming to Prince Edward Island from her home in Newfoundland and Labrador to put on a new writing workshop in partnership with the PEI Writers' Guild and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. This workshop, entitled Walking, Writing, and Memory Mapping, focuses on nature writing and memory mapping, and explores the connection between writing and observation of the natural world.
The group of participants will go on a silent walk together along a trail in the Macphail Woods. On their return, each person will draw a memory map of the walk. Over an extended lunch hour, each participant will write a haiku-like poem or a short prose piece about something they noticed (through any of the senses) on the walk.
After lunch, the group will do the same walk again, stopping at the relevant spots where each person will read their short poem or prose piece to the rest of the group. The group will then return to the education centre, and each person will draw another memory map of the walk. Under the guidance of Marlene, the group will compare the differences between the first memory maps and the second ones. How did the experience of writing a poem/prose piece and listening to others’ writing affect your perception of the place? Can poetry and prose writing help us become better observers of our own experience and the natural world?
Drawing materials will be supplied by Marlene Creates, but please bring along writing materials, like pens/pencils and writing paper or notebooks.
During the second walk, it's preferred you read from paper instead of an electronic device.
As an added bonus, Marlene will give a retrospective tour of her exhibit currently open at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, entitled Places, Paths, and Pauses, on Friday September 21, from 4 to 5pm.
Marlene Creates is an environmental artist and poet who lives and works in a six-acre
patch of boreal forest in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland. Since the mid-1970s, her work has been presented in over 350 exhibitions and screenings across Canada and internationally. A touring retrospective exhibition of her work, titled Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses, is currently at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown.
She has been a guest lecturer at over 200 institutions and conferences in Canada and abroad, and has led environmental and place-based art projects with about 3,000 school children in Newfoundland.
She has facilitated similar workshops at a writers’ retreat in Los Parronales, Chile, titled Re-seeing Things (2012); University of British Columbia Okanagan, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, Kelowna, BC (2013); Elemental Festival on Walking, 4elements Living Arts, Kagawong, Manitoulin Island, Ontario (2016); Eastern Comma Writer-in-Residence, rare Charitable Research Reserve, Cambridge, Ontario (2016); University of Chichester, Departments of Fine Art and English & Creative Writing, Chichester, England (2016); and the Enlichenment, Enlivenment & the Poetics of Place workshop, Edgewood Blue, Upper Clearwater, B.C. (2017).
www.marlenecreates.ca