Seminar and Workshop

With workshop leader, Kelly Cooper

Practice your observational skills and find new sources of inspiration for your writing! Kelly will have participants examine the artwork on display in the gallery space, and then write something inspired by those visual impressions, whether prose or poetry.

The ancient Greeks defined ekphrasis as the act of describing a thing in vivid detail and one of the first examples is in Homer’s epic poem, The Illiad, where the speaker requires nearly 150 lines to describe the shield of Achilles. It has since evolved to mean the act of describing a work of art, as well as the effect that work has on the imagination of the writer. Ekphrasis is a meeting

of mediums, one visual and one verbal. In this workshop, we will be inspired by the AX Gallery’s exhibit of ceramic works. Will we be inspired to write an ode, like Keats, when he contemplated a Grecian urn? A narrative, like Victoria Chang’s “Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room”? Or will we be moved to write just a few glorious lines like these, taken from Anne Sexton’s response to Vincent Van Gogh’s well-known painting, “The Starry Night”?

The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.

Oh starry starry night! This is how

I want to die.

Facilitator, Kelly Cooper, is looking forward to sharing in what can be created when art meets word and word meets art.

About Kelly:

Kelly Cooper is originally from Saskatchewan but has lived in the Sussex area for many years. She has loved books all her life, but she didn’t grow up dreaming of being a writer. Her dream was to be a teacher, like Mrs. Shoesmith, the woman who taught her to read. Kelly started writing in her twenties. Since then, she has published short stories, poems and creative non-fiction in literary journals across Canada, as well as Eyehill, a collection of short stories. She is a two-time winner of the Alice Kitts Award for Excellence in Picture Book Writing.

Her first children’s book, If A Horse Had Words—a 2018 winner of the Alice Kitts Memorial Award—was written for her brothers’ children and the story took her back to her childhood in Saskatchewan. Her family has always kept horses, and one spring when she was visiting, several white foals were born. One of them inspired the character of Moon in her latest book, Midnight & Moon. Her own experience being a quiet child and her work as a Kindergarten teacher are the inspiration for Jack and Clara, the human characters in Midnight and Moon.