How do we capture the world around us? A photographer uses a lens. A painter uses a brush and pigment. A poet uses words. “Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. But they are shapes, they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolours of perception,” says Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. In this workshop for Write On Bowen, we will combine our senses with our vocabulary and find images and details to charge our words with “gorgeous chaos.”

About the facilitator

Susan Alexander is the author of two collections of poems, The Dance Floor Tilts, 2017, and Nothing You Can Carry, 2020, Thistledown Press. Her work has won multiple awards, including the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry. She currently hosts the online poetry series In/Verse for the Federation of BC Writers. Susan’s poems appear in anthologies and literary magazines in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S., have ridden Vancouver buses as part of Poetry in Transit and even shown up in the woods around Whistler. She lives on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, B.C., the traditional territory of the Squamish people.