Creating Portraits in Poetry and Prose with Shelley Tracey

Course Summary

This course focuses on portraits and self-portraits in poetry, fiction, life writing and art. You will explore poetry and prose pieces based on these themes and write a series of portraits and self-portraits in a variety of forms, including poetry, fiction, character studies and memoir pieces. The course draws from a range of literature as inspiration, as well as examples of portrait paintings, photographs and ekphrastic responses to these. In general, ‘ekphrasis’ refers to verbal responses to visual art. We will explore the limitations and possibilities of ekphrasis, and how encountering and reflecting on art works can develop ideas, characters and insights into creativity.

Course Outline

Each session will include guided prompts. By the end of each session, you will have produced one or two drafts of new pieces. Suggestions will be given for optional writing tasks to complete between sessions, and links provided to relevant further information.

Session 1: Perspectives on portraits
We will focus on examples of portraits in writing and art, the assumptions which we make about the subjects. Responses will be composed in poetry and prose.

Session 2: Portraits in Photographs
We will explore the work and motivations of portrait photographers as the basis for responding to prompts. Nan Goldin said “My desire is to preserve the sense of people’s lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty I see in them. I want the people in my pictures to stare back.”

Session 3 Representing Relatives and Relationships
We will respond to poems about family members

Session 4 Portraits in fiction We will explore a range of character descriptions in fiction.

Session 5 Self-portraits We will explore the genre of life-writing and the work of artists such as Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Gentileschi

Session 6 Haiku, Haibun and Haiga

We will build on the inherent ambiguities and silences in these forms to synthesise the ideas and learning from the course.

Course Outcomes

By the end of this course, you will have created a series of poems and/or prose pieces on the theme of portraits and self-portraits, using a range of literary forms. You will also have encountered a series of artists and artworks and their insights into their work, made connections between art and literature, and enhanced your understanding of ekphrasis.

Shelley Tracey’s collection Elements of Distance (Lapwing, 2017) includes a series ‘Self-Portraits of Pablo Picasso’. Shelley’s poems have also been published in journals including The North, Honest Ulsterman, Abridged, Skylight 47 and The Haibun Journal. Shelley has facilitated a wide range of face-to-face and online creative writing classes, many of which incorporate responses to art. ‘The Art of Pictures’ was developed during COVID to explore how images can stimulate creativity and offer different approaches to writing.