BEING IN PLACE: Learning to Observe and Connect with Place

Saturday, March 16, 2024

9 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Address: Funky Little Flower Farm

The Lily Farm in Beech Island, SC is a 1750’s home purchased and renovated by the Farmer family.  Mrs. Farmer (aka Momma), Jenks Farmer and Tom Hall saved the place from ruin. The farm now specializes in rare Crinum lilies and host a few sustainable garden classes.  We’ll send a map and details when you register.

 

Develop your relationship with your place in this day-long workshop. Whether you’ve recently moved or been in your place for decades, exploring the physical and emotional relationships helps build a connection – to ourselves and our social fabric. 

 

The day-long workshop, Being in Place, featuring writer and environmental activist Janisse Ray and plantsman and author Jenks Farmer, will help you explore techniques for creating memorable places in your work.

 

An experienced writing teacher inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Janisse will lead our instruction and exercises. Janisse’s books turn her place in Georgia’s rural landscape into a character itself. Jenks will share how his complicated relationships with places – from the rural South to exotic jungles – shape his writing.  

 

The setting for this workshop, Jenks’s quirky and idyllic 1750 historic farmhouse and garden, is an inspiring venue to explore the dynamics of place – rejecting, seeking, embracing, grieving – and to connect with others who seek to feel settled in their place. 

What you get–

• 6 hours of instruction
• Exercises to generate at least eight short pieces of your writing
• Delicious catered lunch “of the place” prepared by a chef who lives on our dirt road
• Farm and garden tour
• A short reading from the authors
• Copy of Wild Card Quilt signed by Janisse Ray
• Specialty plant grown on the farm
• A day in a 1750 historic farmhouse

 

Agenda

9:00 a.m. Session One

Welcome to the Funky Little Flower Farm – Jenks

Techniques: Getting to know a place – Janisse

Our complicated relationships with place – Jenks

Garden Tour – Jenks

Nature Journaling – Janisse

12 Lunch & Social Hour 

1:00 p.m. Session Two

Southern Sekki – Jenks

Writing to Put a Place on the Map & Place-based Writing – Janisse

Deepening your Relationship to Place – Janisse

 

3:30 p.m. Happy Break

Ways to put yourself on line including substack and  indie publishing  – Jenks & Janisse

5:00 p.m. Workshop Ends