Writing with Water

Water is life. Vital for the replenishment of lakes and streams. Abundant in organisms, wombs and cells. Water heals with its ‘capacity to relieve us of the weight of our bodies’, reflects author Katherine Brabon, and reminds us of origins with its ‘perfect memory... forever trying to get back to where it was’, tells writer Toni Morrison.

This workshop invites you to connect with water – in your body, in places around you, and in history. Where in water do you, your stories, begin?

We will write to the ‘water within’ – that held in our lungs, hearts, and bones; to the ‘water around’, to the riverside cities built beside and over the top of sacred Indigenous waterways; and to the ‘water beyond’, the oceans of history, displacement, and resistance. Together, we will wade into and beyond water’s powerful metaphors. You will finish the workshop with a deepened wonder for the life ways of water, feeling more connected to the place where you live, and to the power that flows and returns through your words.

Content/prompt foci

The water within:  connecting with the body's subterranean life

Water is... not land?  finding inter-relations between land and water, rivers, creeks and cities, flowing and writing

Oceans as gendered:  drawing on oceanic powers and metaphors for resistance

You will need

A computer to connect to Zoom. Materials to write with. A glass of water.

Your facilitator 

Nadia Rhook is a non-Indigenous historian 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 also find her writing in Cordite Poetry, Mascara Review, Portside Review, Westerly, The Mantle Poetry, 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 loves the simultaneous strength and softness of water. In Second Fleet Baby, she connects with a convict ancestor who gave birth during the passage from England to Eora land; an ancestor who ‘held the ocean in one corner of her mind while dragging life from the seabed to the surface with the other’.

*Early bird tickets available until 3 April.