BLF 2026 - Workshop: Rachel Long
£30 bursaries available
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Birmingham Literature Festival 2026
Workshop: Portals, Time Travel and How to Slant and Disrupt Narrative with Rachel Long
This workshop will explore how poems can move through memory, time, and emotional space without relying on linear storytelling. Using works by Michael Donaghy, Kim Addonizio, and Kevin Prufer, you will examine how images act as ‘portals’, carrying your readers between scenes, histories, and emotional states.
Through close reading and generative writing exercises, you’ll experiment with layered narratives, associative movement, and the seamless shifting between present and past to create poems rich with tension, resonance, and surprise.
Expect to leave with a clutch of new poems that slant, disrupt and innovate.
Running time approx. two hours