“Seeing Things: Developing the Image” with UBCO MFA Poets
Saturday, April 6
Downtown Kelowna branch ORL
1380 Ellis St, Kelowna
10:15 am - 11:45 am
Use your senses in this generative workshop to identify and develop the central image for a new poem. An assemblage of natural items will be on hand to inspire you through the senses of touch, smell, sight and sound. Facilitators: Ronan Fraser, Vivek Sharma and Tosh Sherkat.
Spaces are limited to 12 participants.
Ronan Fraser (They/He/She) is a Scottish interdisciplinary artist working across digital media, live performance and visual art. Currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC Okanagan, they are writing a novel for changing times and changing people. Their work shares their own love for the absurd and the surreal whether in it appears in the form of physical theatre, animation, or perhaps finding moments of poetry in places we don't expect it.
Vivek Sharma is a second-year MFA student of creative writing at UBCO. He has been working on a collection of poems that juxtaposes and entangles life in two valleys, from two continents. When he is not working on his thesis, he can be seen wandering flaneur-like around downtown, taking in the sights and sounds and the vibrant energy of urban Okanagan life, or lounging in a cafe reading forgotten lores of our bygone days. One day he hopes to write something that will buy him few cups of grande chai-tea latte at his favourite Starbucks.
Tosh Sherkat is a Persian-Doukhobor settler-of-colour born on Sinixt territory in Nelson, BC, and living on Syilx territory. Their work has appeared in a number of North American publications, most recently carte blanche and Terrain.org. They are currently an MFA student at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan).