Free writing workshops for locals

In 2021 Coledale Community Hall is getting an art upgrade and locals are invited to get involved in the process.

Over the weekend of Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th January the South Coast Writers Centre in partnership with Wollongong City Council ’s Cultural Development Team, is running two free workshops onsite for locals, as part of the design development process for the new mural.

We are really excited that Brad Eastman, aka Beastman, has been selected to paint the mural on the Hall’s southern external wall. He is an muralist whose work is striking and I’m sure that his art will be an exceptional addition to the building’s facade.

On Saturday 23rd January, Judi Morison will present a seminar on Writing Australian History. Judi, a writer with Gamilaroi and Celtic heritage, is a member of the Ngana Barangarai (Black Wallaby) Indigenous Literary Project. Beginning with the example of writing a local history of Coledale, and drawing on the individual writing projects of the participants, the workshop will look at what history is and why we write it, where to research, whose history we’re writing and who gets to write it.

On Sunday 24th, esteemed poet Mark Tredinnick invites participants to explore the practices of attention and expression, of speech music and form that help a poet do justice to the country a poem is set down in. Some poets write landscape because it is their subject. Others write it because they know a poem is not a poem if it is not situated. But place is a practice that for many of us comes less naturally than it did. How do you educate your senses to find the place where your poem has its feet set down?

Mark Tredinnick has been described by Judith Beveridge as "one of our great poets of place." He is the author of the landscape memoir The Blue Plateau and of many other award-winning works of prose and poetry. Come learn from him how to make poems that resemble places in their impeccable congruity. Come learn the arts and crafts of the poetry of place.

Both workshops are free but bookings are required: southcoastwriters.org/upcomingevents