I am so grateful for the 4000+ words of new creative poems/writing generated from recent Stroke the Monster’s Back workshops with Victoria Kennefick David Malouf Poet in Resident at the Queensland Writers Centre for 2025.

I have potentially 4-15 poems, depending on what I chose to develop from my materials. Workshops always remind me writers need to be careful to not rely on just working alone. There’s so much energy, inspiration, to be gained from spending time with other writers in well facilitated workshops, retreats and mentorships. (Disclosure I have been to some terrible workshops.)

Victoria says something like this, Poetry is democratic, with so many styles – some poets are versatile in style and tone, and others have a unique and specific tone, or might be subconsciously writing on a theme without even realising it as they mine their experience. Some poems are meant to be spoken and heard, whilst others are visual experiences on a page.

Like a couple of other talented poetry teacher mentors I have worked with, she chose not to use any of her own work to mentor us, but her book was available for any of us to buy if we wished. And guess what, she sold out!

Like Felicity Plunkett, she doesn’t want participants to feel constrained in a workshop setting, and think that she favours any particular kind of poem over the other.

I don’t like to share too much detail of the exact content and exercises of workshops because for the creatives who run them they are their livelihood but I do give a few hints to make you curious.

On top of that you need to respect the privacy of the other participants. So I won’t speak about the creative works of some of the other participants, only to say there was about twelve of us in each session, and several of us come to both sessions but not all. Amongst these poets there was diversity, brilliance, some great beginnings, some works remarkably well formed, and other pieces by master poets who will still put the work through its paces and, who carry themselves with incredible humility and like many poets have a vulnerability to them. I’d say 75% were women and 25% male. There were also some Irish Australians who felt they really wanted to attend the workshop with Victoria.

Often within such settings other participants might share their works, although a compassionate workshop presenter never, compels people to share but obviously is happy when they do and able to give feedback, and will set up the safety of the group to make it comfortable for them to share if they should so wish. This might be done through small groups as well as by constructively given critique.

However, what I am keen to share the way in which Victoria generally structured her sessions and the supportive tone she set for us to take risks. As well as her qualities as a facilitator as they will inspire you as a teacher or facilitator as to how to draw works from your creative mentees, in this case adult learners whom she had never met before, in another country.

In each session Victoria ran 4-5 creative exercises with us. Sometimes after some source inspiration, she gave us opportunities for timed short creative writes of 7 minutes. She gave us time to small group share within a pair or a group of three. She harnessed some powerful Irish poets through sharing samples of their work. They were a mix of male, female, working class, middle class – who reflected different styles, and utilised those texts as mentor texts to discuss and model and inspire our writing.

We heard her read at the Open mikes (there were no microphones though, just attentive readers) only after all of us had read (these were held shortly after the workshops, with many of us choosing to go, although some couldn’t make these) and some of us at a Quills and Passionate member Soiree event.

Open Readings, held after the workshops

In our quick creative write responses, she asked us to put our editorial voice, or our critics voice to one side, and just write whatever came to us, if possible scarcely lifting our pens off paper and not worrying about punctuation or anything. We could laptop it or handwrite.

She gave us highly interesting prompts which were often reading poets and reflecting on their work, in discussion and turning to actions like thinking of potentials of things that don’t have many poems about them or something that frustrated us – that cause tension with others. I’ve made note of these and can come back to them in the future. She encouraged us to be brave, creative, and dig deeply if we wanted to.

Sometimes she invited us to read a work, taking two to three contributions from the larger group, listening, and providing feedback, before moving to the next exercise. Sometimes she invited someone else to read one of the mentoring poem examples, and sometimes she read these. Never compelling anyone to do so, but always inviting. She used phrases such as ‘tread as heavily or gently as you need to’ in our free write topics, and gave trigger warnings on some of the poems as well.

She expanded our vision, by introducing poets we may not have known of. In the second session, she began to do some editing and shaping, making suggestions for some things we might do, and she also invited us to be inspired by particular words and phrases in the poetry we were reading.

I truly appreciated this sensitive and interactive approach, and the results it was pulling out of me. I was very taken with the beginnings of three of my pieces, and went home and developed them between and after sessions. For those of us who made the first session, we shared something we had worked on during the week, and our peers gave us feedback. Others could share something they had composed in the new session.

Again Victoria modelled as well as asked us to be constructive in our feedback. We focused on lines we particularly liked, or something that might have stood out to us in the style.

Thanks to the Queensland Writers Centre, Arts Queensland and anyone responsible for bringing Victoria out here to encourage local poets, especially Victoria for enduring a long plane ride to make it here.

You can purchase Victoria’s collections online at Carcanet Press

June Reading at It’s Still A Secret, August 9th.