Abigail Ardelle Zammit conducted a creative writing workshop with Claude Escola d'Idiomes on Thursday 30th November. The fifteen participants had previously been asked to bring a picture of their favourite natural location so as to be able to write about it; this is why after a brief introduction, there was a lively discussion regarding how to use evocative words and imagery in order to convey our bodily experience of locales to which we feel attached.

Abigail was pleasantly surprised to hear the adult students express themselves so fluently and enthusiastically, applying their own reading styles to poems by Elizabeth Bishop and Pablo Neruda. Abigail’s PowerPoint presentation included shots of the Atacama desert, which is currently a primary source of inspiration for her, so she was grateful to be able to read a very brief selection of her poetry to the attendees. For Abigail, the most rewarding activity was probably the guided writing-about-place exercise; she wished there could have been more time for this activity, but she hopes the students managed to develop their creative extracts following this short but fruitful encounter.