10 February 2024

Posted by Sukie & Claire

Young Writers - Week 5 (The Art of Writing) - Poetry Potions

In our fifth session of Term 2: The Art of Writing, we explored poetry.

In our check-in, we described our weeks as an item of furniture:

 Claire’s week had been a round, Bohemian rug – exotic and a bit frayed at the edges

 Berry described her week as like a cross sofa, tired of people sitting on it

 Poppy M’s week was also a sofa, but missing a leg – comfy and relaxed, but with a dear

friend on holiday

 Poppy C described her week as a sofa too – very relaxed

 Sukie said their week was like a chest of drawers, with lots of unrelated things going on,

but mostly keeping organised

In our reading check-in, we had some new titles and some old friends:

 Berry: ‘Arsenic For Tea’

 Poppy M: ‘The Wood Witch’, sequel to ‘The Hedge Witch’

 Poppy C: ‘Sherlock Holmes: A Study In Scarlet’

 Sukie: ‘Sabriel’ of the ‘The Old Kingdom’ trilogy

 Claire: ‘Women Don’t Owe You Pretty’ and ‘The Northern Lights’

We talked about the restorative power of poetry, and its ability to describe emotions and

experiences; help people; tell a story and make voices heard. Claire read us the introduction to

‘The Poetry Pharmacy’ by William Sieghart, sharing the beautiful description of poetry as ‘a

crystallisation of feeling, thought and experience’.

We read two extracts from ‘The Poetry Pharmacy’:

 ‘Still I Rise’ by Maya Angelou – a rallying remedy for ‘experiencing oppression’

 ‘Golden Retrievals’ by Mark Doty – a cure for ‘failure to live in the moment’

We then each chose a love potion, poison or anti-love potion/love cure to create for our Poetry

Potions exercise, and set to work coming up with a name, ingredients, a list of side effects,

warnings and dosing instructions.

Berry decided to work on a secret poison – a deadly delayed-action concoction masquerading as

a love potion – while Poppy C elected to create a love potion called ‘Is This Love’ which was only

to be applied at sunrise lest the drinker meet a gruesome fate, and Poppy M brewed up ‘You’re

Too Good For Him’ for getting over a breakup, involving boiling a pan of shampoo and definitely

not falling asleep!

We each took it in turns to roll the story dice to tell a short tale about our potions.

 Berry’s character put three mouthfuls of the mysterious potion on a banana and ate it,

before heading to school through the woods. But the delayed action of the poison was

working in their veins as they went, and they succumbed before they even saw the

school gates. The dice roll that inspired this was ‘bag’, ‘banana’ and ‘tree’.

 Poppy C’s character climbed a ladder and poured the potion over ice cream at the top,

but as it was not sunrise they became a duck! The story dice that prompted this were

‘ladder’, ‘duck’ and ‘ice cream’

 Poppy M’s character was walking her dog with her boyfriend on a campervan holiday.

When they retired to the campervan for the night, she discovered him calling another

girl. She dumped him and ran away with her dog for better and brighter adventures.

Poppy’s story dice were ‘raincloud, ‘pawprints’ and ‘campervan’.

It was a lot of fun playing with poetry and potionmaking with everyone, and we hope the

pancakes to come went just as well!

We won’t be at Forest Arts this weekend (17 th February) due to half term, but we look forward

to seeing everyone on the 24 th for our next workshop: scriptwriting and dialogue!

Don’t forget, the Shaftesbury Tales writing competition has opened! Open to writers living in

Dorset (so that’s at least some of you!), it has age categories of 11 & under; 12-16; 17-19; 25 &

under, and ‘open to all’. It’s a community project with a procession from Corfe to Shaftesbury,

performing the tales of people living in the Dark Ages in villages along the route. The deadline is

18 th March.

Please do spread the word and submit something – if you are looking for some extra eyes on

your work, do come along to the Junior (7-11) & Young (11-14) Writer workshops at Forest

Arts, New Milton. Just as a reminder, we run on Saturday mornings (09:30 for Junior Writers

and 11:30 for Young Writers) and you can sign up by contacting the Forest Arts Centre directly,

or come along and we can add you to the list!

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Young Writers - Week 5 (The Art of Writing) - Poetry Potions