Write Queer Nature Poetry | 4 Part Course | Limited 15 Places | £110

Workshop dates

Monday 19th June 7pm-9pm

Mon 26th June 7pm - 9pm

Mon 3 July 7pm -9pm

Mon 10th July 7pm-9pm

This is essentially a repeat of a course we ran in 2022 but returnees are most welcome as you may want to build on your previous experience and subsequent nature writing. 

The Course

Water is a fluid body. Many mammals exhibit bisexual behaviour. Onions, potatoes and strawberries all reproduce asexually. There are around 300,000 genders of fungi. In short, nature is queer!

Through a series of writing exercises and group discussions of poems from Walt Whitman to Lisa Luxx, Caleb Parkin to Gail McConnell, learn tools and techniques to help you re-see the natural world through a queer lens, generate new queer eco-poems and explore the queerness of nature in your poetry. Throughout the course, there will be opportunities to read aloud your work and receive constructive peer feedback. The course will culminate with (optional) readings plus a discussion of how and where to submit poetry to magazines, presses and competitions. The course is aimed at poets/writers at any level.

• Attendees will learn tools to help them see the natural world through a queer lens.
• Attendees will learn tools to help them plan, write and rewrite poems.
• Attendees will learn about imagery and metaphor, form and structure, rhythm and rhyme.
• Attendees will have the space and time to share their work and receive peer feedback
• Attendees will have the space and time to read and discuss as a group extracts from seminal queer nature poems which illustrate ideas discussed in the class
• Attendees will learn tools to help them read, analyse and discuss queer nature poetry.
• Attendees will have the space and time to discuss how to start and sustain a career as a freelance poet

As part of the last session, attendees will have the opportunity, only if they wish, to share some of the writing they have done during the course.

Minimum Course Numbers 2023

To keep Out on the Page sustainable whilst allowing for experimentation and diversity in the range of activities we offer, we are setting minimum course numbers for our paid activities to go ahead. The minimum attendee number for this course to ahead is 5. If for some reason, this is not reached by 7 days before the course, we will cancel the activity and refund anyone who has bought tickets within two weeks.

Partial Bursaries

Limited places are available for writers who would otherwise be unable to afford to attend.  To request a bursary, please email contact@outonthepage.co.uk.

About James McDermott

Scriptwriter, Poet & Creative Writing Teacher

Website: jamesmcdermottwriter.weebly.com

Literary Agent: Independent Talent

James poetry books include ‘Wild Life’ (Nine Arches Press), ‘Green Apple Red’ (Broken Sleep

Books), ‘Erased’ (Polari Press) and ‘Manatomy’ (Burning Eye Books). James has been published in Poetry Wales,

The North, Butcher’s Dog, Ink Sweat & Tears and Fourteen Poems. James has taught poetry for venues and

organisations nationwide including Out On The Page, Nottingham Writers Centre and London Queer Writers.

James is now an Arvon writing tutor, visiting lecturer at Norwich University of The Arts and lecturer in Creative

Writing at UEA.