CII to host free online nature writing workshop with poet Jane Hartshorn

CII is excited to be working with the Moving Mountains Project to host The Submerged Body, a free nature writing workshop with poet Jane Hartshorn on 23 September, 6-7.30pm.

I felt my body reaching for water as an element of transformation, invested with the power to remake me in a form that I could choose myself.

– Samantha Walton, ‘Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure’

Water runs and flows. Its shape is never set, is always in flux. Even within the basin of a loch or pond, the confines of sea or river bed, or the slippery sides of a swimming pool, water moves and eddies, has the potential to spill beyond the shape that carries it.

In this creative writing workshop, we will draw from examples of watery writing in literature to explore the submerged body. We will examine how these descriptions may resonate with what it feels like to inhabit a sick body, and how we might use the transformative power of water to write about the experience of illness.

Jane Hartshorn is a poet and PhD candidate at the University of Kent, writing about the lived experience of chronic illness. Her pamphlets include Tract (Litmus Publishing, 2017) and In the Sick Hour (Takeaway Press, 2020). She has had poems published by Boudicca Press, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Lucy Writers and SPAM and is an editor at Ache Press. She is on Twitter @jeahartshorn.

For more information, and to register, visit The Submerged Body event page.

The workshop is supported by The Wren Project, which provides free listening support for people diagnosed with autoimmune disease in the UK, and funded by Arts Council England.

Image: Stefano Zocca via Unsplash