Chance: A Writing Workshop

Wednesday – 11/8 – 7PM
Adirondack Center for Writing
15 Broadway, Saranac Lake, 12983

This event is free and open to the public. We encourage registrants who can afford it to donate when registering in order to help us continue to offer free education to all.

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Chance and Generations: A Writing Workshop with paleontologist Frankie Dunn and poet Penny Boxall 

Following on from Dr Frankie Dunn’s palaeontological talk, this creative workshop will focus on the idea of chance, and how we can make sense of its power in poetry. Together, we will create new work which engages with (and is led by!) random events, serendipitous links, and changing the rules, through discussion of texts and creative exercises. Come ready to read, discuss, and write.

Boxall and Dunn will take part in a performance here at ACW the following night (Thursday, November 9 at 7PM)

Frankie Dunn
Frankie Dunn is a palaeobiologist based at the University of Oxford. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Warwick in 2015 and her PhD in 2019 from the University of Bristol. She subsequently moved to Oxford to take up two fellowships: a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College and an Early Career Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the exhibition of 1851. She is now a NERC Independent Research Fellow and a Senior Researcher at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Frankie’s research focuses on the rise of animals: a profound transition in the History of Life – for the first-time organisms were able to engineer the environment around them, altering geochemical cycles, building complex ecosystems and diversifying into myriad forms. The ultimate aim of this research is to understand how animal bodyplans evolved in deep time.

Penny Boxall
Penny Boxall is a poet whose published collections are: Ship of the Line (Eyewear, 2014); Who Goes There? (Valley Press, 2018); and In Praise of Hands (with Naoko Matsubara’s woodcuts, Ashmolean Museum, 2020). She has won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award (Scotland’s largest poetry prize) and the Mslexia/PBS International Women’s Poetry Prize. She is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, and has held fellowships/residencies with UNESCO Cities of Literature, Tartu, Estonia (2022); Merton College, University of Oxford (2019); Château de Lavigny, Switzerland (2018); Hawthornden Castle, Scotland (2017, 2023); and Gladstone’s Library, Wales (2017). Her poetry has appeared in places including The Sunday Times, POETRY (Chicago) and The Rialto. In 2021 she received funding from Arts Council England to develop her first novel for children. In 2023 Merton College Choir will premiere a work by Gabriel Jackson, setting new poems by Penny.