Erin Fornoff - Glimmers: A Writing Workshop

Glimmers will explore the small moments of resonance. We will look at the visceral fragments and vignettes of your life, creating pieces that will connect in surprising ways. Come along and explore this new writing method if you’re stuck or looking for something new.

Join award-winning poet Erin Fornoff – this year’s Artivist in Residence - in a writing workshop on the glimmer method. We will be writing small fragments and vignettes about moments in your life that have resonated with you - drawn from the physical world, images and moments that have compelled us, various points of resonance. A glimmer might be an overheard conversation, the time you saw a valley bathed in moonlight on your first trip alone, the time you painted your house just before a rainstorm, the thing your father said in anger you’ll never forget.

We will work to bring these glimmers alive on the page, focusing on vivid sensory detail and allowing them to fit together in new and surprising ways, creating a collage of these exquisite moments: ‘build the beads and the thread will appear’. If you are looking to refresh your writing practice, don’t have time to write, or want a new way to use that blank notebook, this one is for you.

Suitable for writers and non-writers alike. Limited to 20 participants

Erin Fornoff has published a poetry collection Hymn to the Reckless (Dedalus Press) shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award as well as a chapbook Folk Heroes (Stewed Rhubarb Press). She has performed her poetry at hundreds of events including three times at Glastonbury Festival, RTE Culture Night at Dublin Castle, and a national Irish tour with poet Hollie McNish. She has featured on BBC3 and her poems have been included in Best New English and Irish Poets 2016. Her essays have been featured in The Journal, The Irish Times, Architecture Ireland, and Winter Papers.

The Irish Times said of her work 'Erin Fornoff is blazing a trail as the non-traditional poet." and the Glastonbury blogger said of Erin, 'she excels in word portraits in a few spare words..she talks about loss in such a fluid, beautiful way that it eases it, somehow.' She wrote and performed We Are An Archipelago in Dublin Fringe Fest 2022, a poetry show set to a live score, which received a four-star review in The Irish Times, which called it ‘entrancing’. The text of the play will be published as a poetry collection in late spring 2025. She is finishing her first novel, a satire based in the nonprofit sector.

As our Artivist in Residence Erin will deliver an evening performance on 27 March and a lunchtime talk about her practice on 28 March.

Host or Publisher Imagine! Belfast Festival of Ideas & Politics