Events

In this one-day writing workshop, award-winning author Joan Fleming will lead playful and generative exercises that invite absurdity, indecorum, and the ridiculous into your writing, via our focus on the natural world. Expect to spend the day doing close-readings of marvellous short texts across fiction, poetry, and non-fiction; engaging in dynamic group discussion and brainstorming; and going inwards periods of quiet, focussed writing where you respond to a series of prompts designed to get you thinking differently about the possibilities of the page – and the possibilities of our fragile, strange, entangled connections with everything on earth that isn’t us. The day will include: 

• Morning session 90 minutes
• Break for coffee
• Late morning session 90 minutes
• Long lunch break
• Afternoon session 120 minutes

Full Description:  Joan’s approach to writing workshops is to create an inviting, inclusive, dynamic container where we can think new thoughts together in a safe space for experimentation, and for sharing freshly generated work. Themes might include: our strange relationship with animals; blurring supposedly hard boundaries between the human and non-human; leaning into our feral inheritance; the curious intelligence of wild nature; and the grief that arises when we contemplate wild nature in deep trouble. By the end of the day: Expect to come away with three new pieces drafted, to revise, refine, and expand. Joan’s particular interest is in taking your standard “nature writing” – i.e.., the call of the wild geese! awe! transcendence! – and getting a little weird with it. A little irreverent. A little absurd. Come and connect with the wild, the odd, the sad, the animal, the uncanny, the broken, and the eco-absurd. About Joan:  Joan Fleming is an award-winning author from Australia/Aotearoa. Her debut novel The Fig Book — a darkly funny madcap ecological folktale — is forthcoming with Mariner in the US and Allen & Unwin in Australia/NZ. In 2025 she was the Kaipukahu Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato. Her honors include the Biggs Poetry Prize, the Verge Prize for Poetry, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize from the Hunter Writers’ Centre, a Creative New Zealand writing fellowship, and a residency with the Michael King Writers’ Centre. She has been teaching creative writing at Antipodean universities for over a decade.