Workshop: Elegy with Tusiata Avia

What does it mean to write toward loss without flattening it? How do we make space for grief, memory, and witness on the page while holding space for complexity, contradiction, humour and the body?

In this generative workshop led by acclaimed poet and performer Tusiata Avia (NZ), explore elegy as a living, elastic form. Moving beyond traditional notions of mourning, we’ll work with elegy as a space for addressing what has been lost, what is still unfolding, and what resists being resolved.

Through close reading, guided writing prompts, and discussion, participants will be invited to experiment with voice, fragmentation, address, and refusal. We’ll consider how elegy can hold anger and humour as well as tenderness, specificity as well as myth, and how it can speak to personal, collective, and inherited forms of grief.

This workshop is open to writers at all stages who are interested in deepening their practice, especially those working with poetry, hybrid forms, or performance writing. Participants can expect to leave with new drafts, expanded approaches to elegiac writing, and a renewed sense of how language can hold what feels unholdable.