Janet Sutherland
A Place by the Sea
Date: 14th March 2026
Time: 11am – 1pm
Venue: Hillcrest Centre, Bay Vue Road, Newhaven, BN9 9LH
Tickets: (£5 / £3) Eventbrite
Ticket prices are subsidised through the generosity of Seaford Town Council and the Chalk Cliff Trust.
There are a limited number of bursary tickets available on a discretionary basis.
Please contact admin@seahavenpoets.co.uk if you have concerns about ticket prices.
Details
In this two-hour workshop we will aim to write a poem focussing on a place by the sea. It might be about Newhaven or Seaford or about somewhere else that you know well. We’ll start by reading At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop, a poem set in a quiet fishing area probably in Nova Scotia. We’ll do some free writing thinking about the sea, the beach, a building or a structure, the people who might live in that community, we’ll think about what the place feels like at different times, the influence of the sea and the weather. We’ll think about how places and communities might change us. Then we’ll start drafting a poem. There’ll be an opportunity at the end of the workshop to share what you’ve written if you’d like to.
Please bring something to write with, and something to write on.
Workshop Leader: Janet Sutherland
Janet Sutherland is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Messenger House (Shearsman Books, 2023). Her previous collections all from Shearsman are Home Farm (2019), Bone Monkey (2014), Hangman’s Acre (2009) and Burning the Heartwood (2006). The Messenger House, a hybrid collection, is about her great-great-grandfather’s travels to Serbia in the 1840’s. Widely anthologised, she is published in magazines such as New Statesman, The Spectator and The North. She won the 2017 Kent and Sussex Poetry Prize and received a Hawthornden Fellowship for 2018. https://www.janetsutherland.co.uk/
