"Being Brave" Writing Workshop with Elizabeth Herron
Sunday, April 14, 2024; 1-3pm
Located in the Little Red Hen Dining Room at SebArts
RSVP required
The Being Brave Poetry Workshop brings people together to discover their deeper, often hidden, feelings of hesitation and fear and to transform those feelings through writing using poetic language. Simple suggestions for connecting with the heart and brief writing prompts take participants into the imagination where the possibilities for transformation arise through the discovery of personal images and their shaping into words. This in itself is profoundly empowering. We long to have our hearts awakened, and poetry is about the heart. In the Being Brave Poetry Project, we hear the heart speak.
Courage in Community - The workshop is unique in focusing on each individual finding poetic language that represents their personal experience dealing with the fears we all have. Drawing language from the dark corners of the heart -- their own images translated into their own words -- in the making of a poem gives participants a sense of joyful creative control. As we share these unique images and feelings in poetic language, a nascent sense of community seems to emerge within the group. We find we are more courageous as we support each other through careful listening and sharing.
Excited by the possibility of enlarging public awareness and appreciation of poetry, the instructor, Elizabeth Herron, has been encouraging workshop participants to make a Pocket Poem from the very personal language they discover during the workshop. These small poems hold for the maker a condensed and potent energy. The Pocket Poem is their very own, a talisman, a nugget of courage to bring to mind in moments of uncertainty or anxiety. Participants are self-affirmed by having created something so specific to their own.
About the Instructor: Elizabeth C. Herron, Sonoma County’s 2022-2024 poet laureate, writes poetry and articles on art and ecology, the importance of natural systems and biodiversity in the well-being of all life. Her collection of poems, Insistent Grace, reflects these concerns. Her latest book, In the Cities of Sleep, centers on the ramifications of climate change. For years, Herron taught at Sonoma State University, wrote and published poetry and fiction and kept her eyes on environmental disasters and global climate change.