Poems about Place: Writing Workshop with Vancouver’s Poet Laureate

The process of writing about place is an important way for us to explore in ourselves and to communicate with others our connections to a place. How can we begin to write evocative and meaningful poems about the historically, culturally or ecologically significant places in our city, those places that may represent generations of family and community stories? Or places that we have more modest connections to but nonetheless have come to mean something important to us.

Join Vancouver’s poet laureate, Fiona Tinwei Lam, during Heritage Week Heritage: Altogether Inclusive in its theme and explore an underemphasized way of making and sustaining connections to places. Fiona will lead this 1.5-2 hour online Zoom workshop commencing with a short period of grounding, stretching and meditation, a discussion of a few examples of site-based poems, and then lead into writing exercises and short rounds of timed writing and sharing with other participants. The writing generated during the session will provide participants with the raw material on which to build possible poems, essays, stories or more.

Please bring an object or photo (or map) relating to a place you wish to write about.

We thank UBC St. John’s College for their support in helping us deliver online programming.

Zoom link will be sent to you at a date closer to the event after registration.