Stay alive! Stay alive! Writing place in a time of crisis: a poetry workshop with Kathleen Jamie and Karen Solie. - The Barn

Kathleen Jamie is a poet, essayist and Scotland's fourth Makar and Karen Solie is a celebrated Canadian poet who teaches Creative Writing half-time at the University of St Andrews.

The italicised is the title of Kathleen's essay published in the LRB in 2022, in which she writes, "It's been a while since we have been able to turn to the natural world for reassurance . . . the feeling of being imperilled is now constant: the sense that something is cracking like a parched field, the veneer of our hitherto secure lives."

In this workshop they will discuss the role of poetry amid climate crisis, read poems that address environmental precarity from the perspective of the local, and engage in generative writing experiments that might reveal the seeds of new work and suggest ways forward for ourselves and our communities.

Kathleen Jamie’s poetry collections include The Overhaul, which won the 2012 Costa Poetry Prize, and The Tree House, which won the Forward prize. Her non-fiction includes the highly regarded Findings trilogy (Findings, Sightlines, and Surfacing), all regarded as important contributions to the 'new nature writing'. The Bonniest Companie appeared in 2015, and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. 

The Keeliehawk – Poems in Scots appeared in 2024. From 2021-24, Kathleen served as Scotland’s Makar, or National Poet.

Karen Solie is the author of six collections of poems. Her most recent, _Wellwater (_2025), won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Canadian Governor General's Award for Poetry. She was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and has been awarded a 2026 Windham-Campbell Prize. Karen teaches in the autumn semesters for the University of St Andrews, and spends the rest of the year in Canada.