Arboreal Confessional

Workshop details:

Spring has arrived with a vibrant blossoming of creative energy. A joyful celebration of nature’s continual rebirth. It is a time for sloughing off winter’s coats as we emerge from the long nights to feel the chill spring winds and warm sunlight on bare skin. These natural cycles teach us how to embrace change in order that we might grow. Cultivating an honest and mindful approach to our Selves through deep listening to both our external surroundings and internal dialogues helps us to navigate the difficulties of modern day living with integrity and grace.

As we recognise our innate connection to the natural world, the rooted nature of trees allows our confessionals to be absorbed into the earth: speaking, we transmute confusion into clarity; engaging the poetic imagination we bring forth that which is hidden so that we might master our own self-evolution.

Join award-winning poet and performer Sophie McKeand for a three hour workshop connecting to the energy of the spring trees. In the pre-amble to our solo Arboreal Confessionals we’ll work as a group on exercises that engage the poetic imagination and aid with speaking our truth. Those who wish to will have the space and prompts to create a piece of writing centred around this experience, but this is not compulsory, the experience will be enough.

All are welcome. Absolutely no writing experience or knoweldge of poetry is necessary, just bring a curious, open mind. Sophie will hold space with the trees for you to bring your thoughts but you aren’t expected to share confessionals or writing with the group (unless you want to).

About Sophie:

Sophie McKeand is an award-winning poet from Wales. She has been working with tree-energy for over a decade and has commissioned work carved into a Woodland Trust legacy pole in Bute Park, Cardiff. Over the past fifteen years Sophie has created workshops for organisations such as the National Trust, Woodland Trust, Literature Wales, and Arts Council Wales. Her poem, A Winter Poem For Connecting With Trees https://www.sophiemckeand.com/outsider/poetry/a-new-year-poem-for-connecting-with-trees/ (gifted to her by an oak tree in Bala, north Wales) continues to be used by fellow poets and workshop practitioners, and often appears in natural spaces such as National Trust sites.
Her latest piece, Eudaemonia, an epic audio-poem charting The Swift’s mythical and surreal exploits across the city of London, will launch as audiobook on 1st May 2024.

www.sophiemckeand.com

See the end of this page for Sophie’s more comprehensive biography.

More information:

• An audiobook download of Eudaemonia, Sophie's new epic sound-poem launched on 1st May 2024, is included in the price.
• Workshop will run 2pm – 5pm in Victoria Park on Friday 1st May 2024.
• Maximum 10 participants.
• Please bring your preferred form of writing (pen/pencil & paper, phone, tablet).
• Come dressed for the weather as we’ll be outside for the entire time.
• Bring a folding chair, rug, cushion or something similar.
• If the rain is torrential the workshop will be postponed.
• For part of the workshop we’ll be barefoot.
• A cold herbal tea infusion and cocoa-peanut power balls (ve/gf) will be provided but please bring your own cup/mug and any other drinks and snacks you might require.

Cost:

£15 full price for those in a position to do so.

Pay what you can afford on the day for those on a low income. Please email Sophie: [email protected] to book your place, no questions asked.

Sophie’s longer biography:

Sophie McKeand is an award-winning poet, writer, and sound artist, creating at the intersection of humanity, technology, and nature. She won the OUTspoken London Award for Innovation in Poetry, has beenlonglisted for the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition, and was the recipient of a Creative Wales Award. She is the author of three poetry pamphlets: Prophecy: conversations with my Self (2010), Hanes (2016), and The Slow-Time Traveller (2018), and a full-length hard-back poetry collection, Rebel Sun (2017); she collaborated on an album of poetry & noise, inc. fronting live performances, DRKMTR (2012); devised & performed in two shows, Metaforestry (2013), & CRØWOMAN (2018); and feminist cli-fi series The MthR Trilogy: The Madness of Sara Mansfield (1/5/2021), Prophets of The Red Night (1/5/2022), and Rematriation (1/5/2023). For The MthR Trilogy book tour Sophie created a fluid show of spoken word extracts from the novels performed with looped field recordings & improvised soundscapes, which she then took to Focus Wales Festival, as well as a special recording for Unpsychology Magazine, and then multiple performances at Stockholm & Gothenburg fringe festivals.

Sophie’s work has been published widely including Poetry Wales, Planet magazine, Dark Mountain & more. She has performed extensively including at Hay Festival, Uncivilisation, Caught by the River, the Kolkata Literature Festival, & more. Her public commission on a Woodland Trust legacy pole resides in Bute Park, Cardiff, her commission to commemorate the Aberfan disaster was performed on the Wales Millennium Centre’s stage by Michael Sheen, and her commission to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NHS is installed in the Grange University Hospital, Cwmbran. She has also conducted live on-stage interviews with: Andrew Motion, Sarah Howe, Victoria Coren, Jack Monroe, Jon Ronson, Viv Albertine, and John Robb.

About Sophie's work:

Review of The Madness of Sara Mansfield (1st in The MthR Trilogy):McKeand offers us hope in language, poetry and the natural world that carries on despite the violence hurled at it … let its visceral lyricism carry you, because there is beauty here, in the intensely visual prose, in the epic narrative. And it’s a plea, as well, to stop, to think, to reconnect with ourselves and with the earth… Catrin Kean, Planet Magazine

“Politics and nature, individuality and community, are all fused in McKeand’s grand and capacious vision. It is what makes this book [Rebel Sun] so charismatic and endearing.” Poetry Wales

“…a serious, as well as a seriously playful, poet.” New Welsh Review

Sophie McKeand joined us on stage at The Good Life Experience … where she captivated the audience with her profound, mythological, musical poems that not only crossed borders but seemed to dismantle them entirely, collapsing time and space and merging visions of the past with narratives of the personal. Caught By The River

Sophie McKeand's Rebel Sun is no dying star, but a fiery tour de force, full of surreal and ingenious imagery. [...] a passionate and heartfelt book, a collection of modern agitprop poetry in which Marxism and landscape rub easy shoulders, and the Rebel Sun acts as an agitator, its manifesto calling for a reconnection with the natural world [...] Accomplished and vibrant, this is a collection to cherish. Kathy Miles, Planet Magazine

Sophie writes poems in which strange, old, true things are forced into contact with the present. They twist and turn and you never get quite what you expect from them, which is what gives them their power… some of the most interesting poems I've read in a long while. Genuinely original. Paul Kingsnorth

An allusive, restless sensibility turned outwards to the world; her words have heft, they grasp their way out of poetry into landscape. Jay Griffiths

Host or Publisher Sophie McKeand