What a fun session we had on green writing with Bijal Vachharajani! In a single hour, we spoke of a million creatures from elephants to frogs, ferrets to spiders, lion-tailed macaques to slugs that aren’t slugs.
Bijal’s workshop was a guest session at my writing programme. We’ve just reached the end of our poetry module, so it was the perfect time to invite a guest to do a workshop for us, and I thought of Bijal because the Art is Everywhere series – which Bijal has co-authored – is one of my favourite sets of rhyming verse. I loved how she led us through the workshop yesterday, beginning with a free writing exercise for us to shed our inhibitions and get writing and then moving on to more structured writing.
In the central element of the workshop, Bijal showed us seven images (all taken by one of her co-authors Radha Rangarajan), and asked us to write two lines of poetry about each one. Here are the animals we wrote about:
- Jumping spider
- Asian elephant
- Baya weaver bird
- Lion-tailed macaque
- Bush frog
- Mudskipper
- Ghost crab
I loved what the children shared!
Guest sessions add a vibrancy to the writing programme. The best ones sparkle and stand out, making us excited to write again. The next guest session is already in the pipeline, and it promises to be just as much fun!
Leave a Reply