I’m delighted to share a project I’ve been developing with I Am Loud Productions for a while:  online poetry workshops! Obviously given the circumstances with the pandemic, the majority of educational programming has had to adapt to digital contexts. We’ve embraced this challenge in part by rolling out a series of workshops for our supporters on Patreon at the Community Tier. This series contains not only set, filmed workshops but will also feature live workshops held over Zoom. It’s taken a lot of work to plan this series, film and edit the initial videos, and roll everything out, but I’m really proud of how it’s turning out. Our aim is to grow our Patreon Community into a wider collective of writers participating in these workshops and sharing poetry with one another.

As a teaser for the Patreon workshop series, we’ve released the first episode on our YouTube channel for free! It’s all about erasure poetry and features a step-by-step guide and detailed advice on how to create this style of poetry both using a physical text (i.e. blacking out words in a book) and on a digital device such as your computer, tablet, or phone. It’s aimed at beginners, so even if you have no experience writing poetry and you’ve never heard of erasure poetry, you’ll be able to take the workshop and get a poem out of it.

Hope you enjoy! Please like and subscribe to receive more of our YouTube videos, including poetry performances, podcasts, and more. And if you’d like to continue accessing these workshops, you can sign up to our Patreon. We’d love to have you on board, and your support would go a long way towards helping keep us afloat through this difficult period. Thanks! -K