This will be a fun and playful workshop, which will start by exploring lineage of ‘Surreal Narrative’ – looking at French Surrealist, Benjamin Perét’s extreme, non-coherent, surreal narratives, which influenced the Pulitzer Prize-winning Neo-Surrealist James Tate, who is considered a master of the Surreal narrative.

We’ll look at poetry and artistic statements of contemporary UK poets working in Surrealism, including Luke Kennard and Caroline Bird; we’ll do some in class writing, based around dreams, half-remembered or otherwise, and look at poems from Kennard’s pamphlet MISE EN ABYME, which demonstrates this technique.

We will then move on to ‘Dreaming awake on the page’, a method of the late American Prose Poet Russell Edson.

We’ll also delve into the animal and inanimate object worlds of Jane Yeh and Lila Matsumoto.

Lastly, we’ll look at images – reading some Surreal Prose Poems by Tom Jenks from his book A Long and Hard Night Troubled by Visions and the spoof instructions and absurd advice of Mark Waldron in his most recent book Sweet, Like Rinky-Dink, before producing new work of our own, inspired by these poets.

So, if you’re interested in developing the Surreal side of your writing, this is the workshop for you!

Vik Shirley‘s chapbook, Corpses (Sublunary Editions), was published in 2020. Her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN Press), her book of photo-poetry, Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock Press), and her pamphlet, Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Beir Bua Press), were published in 2021. 

Date: Saturday 23 July 2022, 10.30am – 4.30pm.
Location: Online via Zoom
Cost: £84

Book your place here