Course Leader:  Rosie Jackson

Course Date:  Friday 9 - Sunday 11 May

Course Options:  Residential £399 .00, Non-Residential £272 .00 (Early Bird R, £379 .00 NR £258 .00 - Deadline: 07/02/25 )

Course Timings:  Course starts and ends with lunch

Course Code:  R0825

Course Information:

In this workshop we will write poems inspired by some of the great mystics of the past and present. We will not deny difficult personal or social realities, but move through them to find meaning and epiphany. From Rumi through John Donne and George Herbert to R.S. Thomas, Marie Howe, Naomi Shihab Nye, we will explore ways of finding radiance, faith and the sacred in the most challenging of circumstances. Derek Walcot claimed ‘Poetry is a form of prayer.’  Come and immerse yourself in words and silences that reveal the life of the spirit within the everyday and show you how to turn writing into a daily practice of revelation and affirmation.  

Previous participants describe this course as ‘absolutely excellent’, ‘transforming,’ ‘nourishing and inspiring’.

Course Leader:

ROSIE JACKSON B.A., D.Phil., is a prize-winning poet and creative writing tutor living in Devon after many years in Somerset. She has runs workshops in UK, Greece, and in Cortijo Romero, Spain. A passionate believer in the power of the creative arts to heal and transform, Rosie has worked in many community and health contexts.  She enjoys collaborating with other writers, artists, film-makers and photographers. 

Her most recent poetry collections are: Love Leans over the Table ( Two Rivers Press, 2023), Light Makes it Easy  (Indigo Dreams, 2022), Aloneness is a Many-headed Bird  (with Dawn Gorman, Hedgehog Press, 2020), Two Girls and a Beehive: Poems about Stanley Spencer and Hilda Carline  (with Graham Burchell, Two Rivers Press, 2020), The Light Box  (Cultured Llama, 2016). 

In 2023, Rosie was commended in the National Poetry Competition (out of 17,800 entries!) for her poem about the medieval mystic Margery Kempe.  Other awards include 1st prize Teignmouth 2021, 1^st  prize Poetry Space 2019, 1^st  prize Wells 2018, 1^st  prize Stanley Spencer Competition 2017. 

Moniza Alvi says of her work: ‘These are rare, nourishing poems, open and vulnerable, spiritually aware and with an acute sense of beauty and struggle.’  

Bel Mooney wrote in a review of the new collection: ‘She is a rare poet of transcendence who expresses the inexplicable with grace.’   

Kim Moore writes: ‘There is a restless energy and a searching intelligence at work here – creating startling, moving poems that explore the porous, shifting boundary between the historical and the contemporary.'

www.rosiejackson.org.uk