The outdoor workshop in St George’s Gardens will focus on deepening a connection with the environment and sense of history, while enhancing our responses in the present. Areas of the graveyard will serve as prompts for the imagination — like a treasure map where we seek and hope to find inspiration from place and creativity from within. The surrounding nature — trees, flowers, ivy, squirrels, and birds — can heighten the interdependence of life and death, past, present, and future.

Activities will include a word poem (a combined clustering of the group’s responses to the site), writing inscriptions in place of those worn out on the graves, or, as an alternative, finding one of the ancient plane trees and writing what it has seen. We will finish by inviting participants to share their writing or their experiences if they wish to do so.

As this is a nature therapy workshop, participants will be writing outdoors in Autumn weather. Please bring, as well as writing materials (notebook and pen), warm clothing, waterproof shoes and coat or an umbrella. (The event will move indoors to the nearby venue of Holy Cross Church on Cromer Street only in extreme weather conditions).