NB: To make the most of Poetry for Women Workshops, please ensure that you book your place for both sessions on Tuesday 25 March and Tuesday 8 April.

Session 1: Motherhood And Meaning

Poetry For Women: Embracing Your Voice, Embracing Yourself

Join author, editor and poet Madeleine F White (Mother Of Floods, The Horse And The Girl, Maiden Mother Crone, Write On!) to explore how your own experience, strength and hope of womanhood, can create stories that matter – to you and to others.

Madeleine will use a selection of her own poems, drawn from her unflinching memoir in verse, Maiden, Mother, Crone, to inspire a poetic response. Aimed at mothers and maybe those who want to be but can’t, this poetry will be used to explore what motherhood means in order to help the building of positive, supportive communities. The workshop will include discussions round legacy and guilt, and how to pass the right things forward. These light touch writing workshops will give beginners and experienced writers the opportunity to be inspired and have a space to be creative.

By combining a practical and creative focus, the activities are designed to connect your ideas to each other and to platforms where voices that are all too often silenced can be amplified. You will therefore be invited to submit your work to the Maiden Mother Crone Anthology, a collection of poems published in response to the collection by Sea Crow Press in April 2026. There is a call to action at the end of Madeleine’s collection which these workshops are based on:

Threads

Love is red,

healing is blue,

poetry combines the two.

Cast fear aside and take up your thread…

With inclusion and spiritual expression at the heart of her work, Madeleine will also reflect on the importance of writing with purpose as part of her writing journey, reminding us that as women, we speak the same fundamental truths the world over.

The first collection in the Crossing Places series, The Horse And The Girl (out 4 February 2025), can be purchased or pre-ordered here and the second, Maiden Mother Crone (out 1 April 2025) can be purchase or pre-ordered here.

If you have any accessibility requirements, please directly get in touch with us at pentoprint@lbbd.gov.uk

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