Disruptions: Creative Writing Workshops
1–3.30PM | SATURDAYS 15, 29 FEBRUARY: Live. SATURDAYS 9, 23 MAY: Online
Poet-in-Residence for Many Voices, all of them loved is Nisha Ramayya:
Nisha Ramayya is a poet who is especially interested in translation and notions of decolonising translation; the sociopoetics of everyday life; and myth, ritual, and performance as forms of experimentation and resistance. Recent publications include States of the Body Produced by Love (Ignota, 2019), a book of poems and essays about Indian history, heritage and migration, and Threads (clinic, 2018), co-authored with Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil, a critical-creative pamphlet on writers of colour living and working in white spaces. She is a founding member of the ‘Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK’ research group and of interdisciplinary practice-as-research group ‘Generative Constraints, and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London.
DISRUPTIONS is a series of four creative writing workshops, led by poet Nisha Ramayya, and organized in conjunction with the exhibition Many voices, all of them loved. Following the key questions of the exhibition – what is a voice, and how does it operate? – the workshops will create a space for participants to consider the sounds that we make when we speak and when we are silent; to activate our voices in conversation and in individual and collective activities; and to realise the multivocality of our own voices on the page and in performance. Disruptions involves raising our voices together in disharmony to rupture the quietism of the status quo and to enrapture each other and ourselves with the idiorrhythmic song of the world!
Loosely linked to the ‘Interruptions’ series that is also organized in conjunction with the exhibition, which Ramayya will introduce at the beginning of each workshop (so don’t worry if you can’t attend all the events!), participants will explore the exhibition in a relaxed and informal setting, spending time looking, listening, and responding to the artworks in a range of ways. For example, in the first workshop, following Sophie Holmes-Elliot’s Voicemaps event, we will make maps of our own voices, taking into account our hometowns, journeys, and communities in relation to our accents, languages, and non-verbal sounds. Then, we will use these maps to write poems and stories that explore the multivocality of our own voices.
You do not need any creative writing experience to attend these workshops (but you do need to book). They are open to all. If you prefer to work in another format, for example, to record your work verbally rather than writing it down, you are more than welcome to do so. The workshops are all about finding different ways to express, experiment with, and activate our own voices, and we will use many different activities and techniques in the process.
