How Creative Writing student Vidhi got over her writers block!

Hi! I’m Vidhi, I’m a second-year international student studying English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. This is my first time staying over in the UK for the summer. The last thing I expected to do was touch a 4 million-year-old meteor stone, learn the easiest technique to start writing a poem and write a poem on ‘If I was a fossil’.

It all started when I was facing a severe writer’s and reader’s block. When I realised that the University hosts more than a dozen activities for students staying over for summer through ‘UoB Xtra’, I started browsing through the list of workshops and stumbled across two exciting ones- ‘Creative Writing at the Lapworth Museum of Geology’ and ‘Ecopoetry Workshop with Cherry Doyle’. Perfect, exactly what I needed at that moment.

I entered the workshop room inside the Lapworth Museum to find an array of fossil specimens and stones of varying sizes, lined up at the centre (there were free snacks and drinks too!). These ranged from a little horse, a coral fossil, a volcanic bomb stone, to a hand skeleton of a gorilla. The first descriptive writing exercise asked us to describe unique features of the objects that weren't visible on the surface, i.e. shift our focus from appearances to the value and history of the objects. As we proceeded with more writing exercises, we learnt lots of scientific words that fit well with poetic syntax and at the same time added an onomatopoeic effect. I was so intrigued by the different perspectives the attendees had on the same object, as they shared their prose-poem pieces on it.

After a session leaving me in an existential crisis, as I was only another speck in the universe, I was excited to jump into ecopoetry the next morning. We were taught the ‘word association’ technique, which links unconventional words together in a logical way to form poetic sentences including metaphors, similes and comparison. In the workshop, we wrote poems inspired from the three shortlisted photographs from the UoB Photography Competition that emphasized biodiversity on campus. These images were of different locations of the campus shot by students. Given its integrated threads with nature, emotions and empathy, ecopoetry is one of the easiest ways of writing poems and a good foundation for unexperienced writers or even non-writers to have a go.

These workshops taught me the importance of acquiring transferable skills and the understanding of linking two different subject areas, like geology and creative writing, to produce unique creative pieces. I would totally recommend grabbing any similar opportunities like this during your time at UoB - expand your knowledge, practice your skillsets and be open to learning something new!