Stories of Stone

Have you ever picked up a pebble you can’t seem to let go of? Tucked a rock collection into a shoe box under your bed? Pressed your cheek against stone as if it can absorb all the grief and longing inside you? What is it about stone that draws us, knows us?

Stone is tactile, physical, mined. Molten lava and its solidification. Ocean beds and their compaction. ‘I’m speaking of real stones. You understand/ Rocks.’ (Richard Hugo, ‘Stone Poems’, 1983.) Stone is also a living thing. As Wurundjeri poet and historian Tony Birch reflects, ‘stone is... patient and thoughtful to an extent that human society appears to be incapable of’ (Griffith Review, 2024). In places across the world, stone speaks in human company. In Malta, writes poet Annamaria Weldon, ‘Neolithic Venus, was translucence eloquent/ enough when stone was our mother tongue?’ (ABR, 2017).

In this workshop, we reflect on our specific relationships with stone to generate new writing. How can paying attention to stone add depth and detail to our stories? How do stone's processes enable us to write organic, non-linear time? And what emotions can be released in our writing when we treat stone as living and animating? You will come away with new ideas, stories, and/or poems, exercises for thinking and writing earth's sacred matter, and a renewed appreciation for the life and wonders of stone.

Content/prompt foci:

Writing specificity: how can we express our specific selves and (hi)stories through writing about stone?

Organic time: stone as a process for writing non-linear and organic senses of time.

Stones alive: emotion and the extra-material life of matter.

Materials:

A device to connect to Zoom.

A stone – or a picture of a stone – significant to you.

Your facilitator:

Nadia Rhook is a non-Indigenous historian, educator and poet with expertise on histories of migration, colonialism and medicine in 19th Century Victoria, and the author of two history-themed poetry collections: boots (2020), and Second Fleet Baby (2022). You can find her writing in Cordite Poetry, Mascara Review, Portside Review, Westerly, What We Carry: Poetry on Childbearing, Australian Poetry Journal’s 2022 and 2024 Best of Australian Poems, and the newly released Women of a Certain Courage.

With over two decades of experience as a teacher and mentor, Nadia has delivered poetry and creative writing workshops for various public and student audiences, including the Perth Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival, Western Australian Poets Inc., Sonic Poetry Festival (Naarm), and as a former lecturer in History and Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia.

Nadia began researching and writing about stone over two years ago while living in Perth/Boorloo, longing to return to the hues and volcano-beginnings of Naarm bluestone. She later learnt that her great-grandfather mined bluestone, among other precious earth. She takes pleasure in having published a poem about the mantle in The Poetry Mantle.