A WAY WITH WORDS: WORKSHOP WITH RICHARD KING

This immersive full-day workshop with Richard King explores the shared craft of poetry and creative nonfiction. Both genres draw on precise language, vivid imagery, rhythm, tone and a strong subjective voice to make emotional and experiential truth memorable. In the morning session, The Noise Made by Poems, participants examine how poems use form, imagery and figurative language to transform lived experience. The afternoon session, Getting Creative with the Truth, focuses on creative nonfiction—shaping sentences and paragraphs, and using poetic devices to render memory and real events with emotional accuracy.

The two-part workshop is designed for aspiring or novice writers, particularly writers with an interest in poetry and creative/literary non-fiction. Please bring works in progress if you have them, or ideas about what you’d like to write if you don’t, and be prepared to show your working!

WORKSHOP SKETCH

Morning session: ‘The Noise Made by Poems’

Introductions

Towards a definition of poetry

Poetic forms and devices (with examples)

Composition time (with one-to-ones)

Presentations and feedback

Lunch

Afternoon session: ‘Getting Creative with the Truth’

Principles of good nonfiction

Hooking the reader in

The sentence and the paragraph

Composition time (with one-to-ones)

Presentations and feedback

RICHARD KING is is an author and critic based in Fremantle. Raised in the United Kingdom, he gained an MA in Literary History and Cultural Discourse and worked in publishing before moving to Australia. His work appears widely, including in The Australian, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Monthly, Griffith Review, Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, Overland and Australian Book Review, and in The Best Australian Poems and The Best Australian Science Writing. His most recent book, Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? (2023), was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Award for Nonfiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. King writes regularly for Arena, focusing on the relationship between culture and technology. His website is bloodycrossroads.com.

This workshop is a part of the Words in Winter Central Goldfields Festival 2026 https://wiwcg.com.au

Contact the host of Writing Workshop: A Way With Words