CÚIRT X FABER ACADEMY WORKSHOPS

Join this workshop with Sacha White to explore the possibilities of combining historical source material with your own writing. Drawing on documents and records, archives and even oral histories, you will experiment with form and voice to create unique poems that simultaneously reach into the past and towards the future.

In this fun and friendly session we’ll explore some ways that poetry can push at the boundaries of the lyric tradition while remaining immediate. Participants will be inspired to attempt new poems in various styles and there will be opportunity for the whole group and breakout group discussion.

Poets create ways to express what’s too difficult to say in other words. We’ll read poems that make use of inaccuracies, lies, misconceptions, and confusion in order to lay bare what emotional realities those deceptions hide. There will be a short section of in-class generative writing.

Join poet Rafeef Ziadah in her spoken word workshop where she delves into the artistry of Palestinian resistance poetry. In this practical workshop, explore storytelling in poems, play with pace and musicality, and boost your stage performance skills. Engage in a dynamic session that brings resistance poetry to life.

This three day workshop will help writers develop a draft, learn to self-edit and provide valuable feedback. Each day we will look at specific techniques and examples, and do in-class exercises, focusing on the scene as a microcosm of the larger work and as a vehicle to explore narrative techniques. Participants will submit work in advance.

In this high-octane workshop we’ll look at how the short story can play with unusual and virtuosic techniques – such as second person or choral narrators, being told backwards or in the future tense – and a host of other exciting forms, to leave you inspired and ready to experiment.

In this workshop we’ll look at how to edit and revise short stories, and think about how to make space to reflect on - and explore - how to take our stories to the next level. With readings and in-class exercises, we’ll reframe and rethink what and how we write.

Leon and Briana, authors of Black & Irish will lead a workshop in which they look at shaping biographies. They will take the group through how to ask questions that will provide an insight into people's stories, how to actively listen, and how to draw out the narrative into sparkling text.

Supported by The Community Foundation

How do we write about a life? From bestsellers by doctors and lawyers to Norwegian experiments in autofiction, the genre of life writing is bigger and broader than ever. Join Richard Skinner to look at the many and diverse ways you can write about your own life or other people's.

Explore the history of family narratives, national and personal histories, and grapple with your own relationship with writing the self. In this workshop we will interrogate different non-fiction labels, from memoir to biography, life-writing to essays, to find which ones we are more comfortable with and develop writing a personal narrative.

An informal Q&A with Joey Connolly, Director of Faber Academy. Come along with any questions you have about developing as a writer, writing courses or mentoring, approaching agents or finding a publisher.