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Mental Health Selfie Poems

Date:
Time:
-
Location:
virtual
Link:
https://dbdli.ca/2025/11/10/mentalhealthselfiepoems/
Calendar:
Community event

Are you a Black Nova Scotian aged 16+?

Do you have an experience, point of view, or story of mental health, mental illness/ Madness/ addiction, and/or mental health care that you’d like to share in poetry?

On November 20th from 7-9pm, we’re holding a virtual event for Black writers called Mental Health Selfie Poems co-facilitated by Anna Quon and Asiah Sparks. The workshop was created by HRM Poet Laureate, Anna Quon, to help inspire and encourage participating writers to create poems around their feelings, experience and/or perspectives on mental health, mental illness or Madness, and mental health care.

In this two-hour workshop we will:

  • Explore our voices through free writing
  • Create or begin an original poem
  • Share and talk about our writing in a supportive space
  • Learn about the Poet Laureate Mental Health Poem Project
  • Share mental health resources for Black community

This workshop is a safe container to work and play with words, express ideas, and create meaning from our lived experience. Bring a poem, share a poem, write a poem.

Registration is free!

If you have questions or need support, email us programs@dbdli.ca

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Experience Levels

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) uses the following terms to describe writers’ experience levels:

  • New writers: those with less than two years’ creative writing experience and/or no short-form publications (e.g., short stories, personal essays, or poems in literary magazines, journals, anthologies, or chapbooks).
  • Emerging writers: those with more than two years’ creative writing experience and/or numerous short-form publications.
  • Early-career authors: those with 1 or 2 book-length publications or the equivalent in book-length and short-form publications.
  • Established authors: those with 3 or 4 book-length publications.
  • Professional authors: those with 5 or more book-length publications.

Please keep in mind that each form of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, writing for children and young adults, and others) provides you with a unique set of experiences and skills, so you might consider yourself an ‘established author’ in one form but a ‘new writer’ in another.

The “Recommended experience level” section of each workshop description refers to the above definitions. A workshop’s participants should usually have similar levels of creative writing and / or publication experience. This ensures that each participant gets value from the workshop⁠ and is presented with information, strategies, and skills that suit their career stage. 

For “intensive” and “masterclass” workshops, which provide more opportunities for peer-to-peer feedback, the recommended experience level should be followed closely.

For all other workshops, the recommended experience level is just that—a recommendation—and we encourage potential participants to follow their own judgment when registering.

If you’re uncertain of your experience level with regard to any particular workshop, please feel free to contact us at communications@writers.ns.ca