Creative writing workshop in collaboration with OPAL

Stephen Mckenzie is a writer, educator and celebrant. He was a secondary school teacher of English, Literature and Drama for over 30 years and has also done a great deal of work teaching adults how to be teachers, writers and sometimes both. Stephen has had a number of poems published in high quality magazines and has written and directed a wide range of plays. Stephen is currently writing a novel speculating upon environmental matters and AI. Stephen has a MA in Creative Writing.

Does writing about grief help?

*How can we write best about the grief we have for those we have lost?

*Can poetry, or other forms, help us with that grief?

When human beings experience powerful emotions, they often want to write about them and often this can be helpful both emotionally and artistically. This is as true of losing a loved one as it is of falling in love or becoming a parent or similar profound life event. Sometimes we want to celebrate the person we have lost, sometimes we write to help us to come to terms with the loss. This year’s National Poetry Day is about this and expressed the impulse to write in this way as ‘Finding a complicity with how you feel, expressed more elegantly than you could ever express yourself, can be the most helpful way of making sense of your emotions and helping you to process them.’

This session will be philosophical, but at the same time very active in terms of the writing you will do. It will explore how intense language and structure can be used to remember those we have lost, and our feelings for them, vividly and authentically.

The main forms of this session will be Poetic, but the techniques and writing outcomes can be applied across all genres.

All participants will need a notepad and pen/pencil, if a laptop or tablet is preferred, that is fine.

Host or Publisher Full Circle Funerals