Photo courtesy of Give Peat A Chance/Yorkshire Wildlife Trust
Digging in the Dirt: Adventures in Ecopoetry
A Poets for the Planet masterclass with Clare Shaw, Caleb Parkin, Rishi Dastidar and Jessica Mookherjee
Tuesday 5 August 2025; Zoom
7.00pm - 8.30pm; £15/£12
All profits donated to Give Peat A Chance
'You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt' - Old Aaphorism
MK Lit Fest have partnered with Poets for the Planet to present this unique event, where four of the UK's most exhilarating practising poets - Clare Shaw, Caleb Parkin, Rishi Dastidar and Jessica Mookherjee - will each present a masterclass that demonstrates their relationshion to location and place, and how this is reflected in their poetry and their writing process and practices.
All writing - even the most abstract - has a location at some level: what happens in stories and poems happens somewhere. In this event, we explore what happens when that geographic focus is narrowed: how do we as writers respond to and capture in our words the experience of specific places, our feelings about and for them, our history with them - or the future we hope to have with or for them? How do we imbue our writing with a sense that our feet have stood on this soil or walked along that pavement, that we have inhaled this breeze and its scents, that we have witnessed the flora and fauna - ourselves included - of this place.
This 90 minte event will include writing exercises and prompts, and you will have opportunities after the event to submit writing that it has inspired to Poets for the Planet for sharing on their website and/or to MK Lit Fest's Raising Voices Project, which is developing an online interactive audio-visual map of people's responses to and relationships with particular locations across our home city.
About Clare Shaw
Clare Shaw (they/them) has four poetry collections with Bloodaxe. Their latest collection Towards a General Theory of Love (2022) is a poetic exploration of love and love’s absence: it won a Northern Writer’s Award and was a Poetry Society Book of the Year 2022. Clare is a dynamic performer and teacher who has written and presented for BBC Radio 3 and 4. They run workshops for a wide range of organisations including Wordsworth Grasmere, the Royal Literary Fund and the Arvon Foundation. A former resident poet of Lancashire Wildlife Trust, Clare is passionate about bogs and moors: they are co-editing The Book of Bogs, which will be published by Little Toller in September 2025.
More about Clare:
About Rishi Dastidar
A poem from Rishi Dastidar’s Laurel Prize long-listed third collection, Neptune’s Projects (Nine Arches Press), was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2024. He is editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches Press), and co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair). He reviews poetry for The Guardian, and is chair of Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing.
More about Rishi:
About Caleb Parkin
Caleb Parkin was Bristol City Poet 2020 – 22, with poems appearing in The Guardian, The Rialto and numerous other journals. He was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please and featured as Radio 3 Breakfast’s Poem of the Week.
His debut, This Fruiting Body (Nine Arches, 2021) was longlisted for the Laurel Prize. Mingle, his second collection, is out now and investigates toxicity, intoxication, and toxified ideals.
Caleb tutors extensively and joyfully, has an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, and is a PhD researcher at University of Exeter with RENEW Biodiversity – where he’s exploring human/animal communication through poetry.
More about Caleb:
About Jessica Mookherjee
Jessica Mookherjee is a British poet of Bengali heritage who grew up in Wales and London, and now lives in Kent. She has been published in many print and online journals and anthologies and was twice highly commended for best single poem in the Forward Prize 2017 and 2021. Author of three full collections from Nine Arches Press: Flood (2024), Notes from a Shipwreck (2022), and Tigress (2019) which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Prize, She also has two pamphlets with Broken Sleep Books; Playlists (2021) and Desire Lines (2023).
More about Jessica:
About Give Peat A Chance
Give Peat A Chance fundraiser has been launched by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust to preserve peatland environments that are thousands of years old. Ancient and iconic landscapes should be a mosaic of vibrant greens, reds and purples. Instead, they are a brown and broken wasteland, and we are at risk of losing them forever. Globally, peatlands are the largest store of carbon on land, holding an estimated twice that stored in all the forests across the world. They're also home to iconic wildlife: Curlew, golden plover, common lizards and field voles all call the peatlands home. YWT are already restoring over 30,000 hectares, but there's still a long way to go. To ensure the survival of these vital and ancient habitats, £100,000 must be raised each year to put their team on the ground.
More about YWT:
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This work is supported by funding from
MK Community Foundation