Coastal habitats: a new 6-week eco-poetry course led by kin’d & kin’d

This exciting new eco-poetry course, inspired by the extraordinary Planet Earth Museum & Gardens at Paradise Park, Newhaven (which explores the evolution of single-celled beings to humans up to the present day’s ecological challenges to our planet) will take place at Planet Earth and at the ONCA Barge, which looks out to sea from Brighton Marina.

This playful course is about imagining or conceptualising the wrack line where human and non-human habitats meet, rather than a close exploration of the coastline. Working outside and inside these two leisure-pleasure locations, a strange map-line may evolve. Drawing on an international range of coastal poetry and ideas about how we imagine Paradise and its opposite, the course will provide plenty of time for writing, collaboration, conversation and interacting in unexpected ways with our chosen environments. All are welcome.

Dates:

• Wednesday 18th May 3.30 – 6pm (ONCA Barge)
• Saturday 21st May 10.30 – 4.30pm (Paradise Park)
• Wednesdays 1st, 8th, 15th June (Paradise Park) 3.30 – 6pm
• Wednesday 22nd June 3.30-6pm (ONCA Barge) 3.30 – 6pm

Price:

For the 5 afternoon sessions and one full Saturday, and to include entrance to the Planet Earth Museum, fees are via a sliding scale. Please pay what you can genuinely afford, knowing that if you pay more you will be helping to subsidise someone who might not be able to do the course otherwise:

• £90 (low income/ students/ unemployed)
• £110 (some expendable income)
• £130 (financially stable/ pay it forward)

What is eco-poetry?

There are many definitions of eco-poetry; kin’d & kin’d explain their approach to it: ‘We think of it as a poetry that aspires to be conscious of what we are doing when we describe, record, interact with or take from what we call nature. It is a poetry that recognises the natural world as source, not resource, and to that end experiments both with language itself and the act of writing in ways that might help us to re-imagine our relationship with the non-human. We trust it is also grounded in respectful connections between people and places, aware of the extractivist roots of climate change, environmental degradation and species extinction.’

Who are kin’d & kin’d?

Since 2018, kin’d & kin’d (Kay Syrad and Clare Whistler) have led a series of eco-poetry workshops at ONCA under the titles Changing Everything Carefully and Field Fairing, also at the re-wilded estate, Knepp Wildland, the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and Groundwork Gallery in Kings Lynn. Their collaborative poems have been published in in journals and by Elephant Press, and they have co-edited several anthologies of course participants’ work including an eco-poetry sourcebook, Wild Correspondings (Elephant Press, 2021).

For more information, please contact Kay at