Lisa Murphy-Lamb has taught French speaking preschoolers, university students with low literacy skills, multi-aged inclusive classrooms for the Calgary Board of Education, and poetry and creative writing in Houston Schools as part of Writers in the Schools–but she has never taught at WordsWorth, until now.

With one full book published, contributions (both written and pictorial) to another book, a couple of newspaper articles, magazine contributions and even a short story published, Lisa is also a writer of no fixed genre.  She is currently the Director of WordsWorth Creative Writing Residency, a student of experiment poetry in the University of Calgary’s Creative writing program sweating cold ash as she attempts new forms of poetry, and a mother of two boys who swear they hate words (but are actually really good writers).

Course: Knapsack Notebook

How does the environment you live in, write in, play in, shape the way you think? Do you take the same route to school everyday?  Why do you? Psychogeography is the art of strolling. Psychogeographic experiences form an escape from daily routine as they enable writers (and nonwriters) to look to their environments in a fresh way. If you manage to look at the city (and any environment you find yourself in) as if  you were six years old again, you wouldn’t need holidays to far-away destinations.  From the incoherent babbling of dreamer- poet Basho, who in the late 1600s lived a wanderer’s life and wrote haibuns, to Bernadette Meyer who would walk a block in Manhattan and write a line (and, coincidently bump into other authors doing the same) to the new phone apps and websites designed to heighten appreciation of the environment in new ways, we will look at how to shape the idea psychogeography to your own writing practice.  So pack a notebook, a pen, a good pair of shoes, maybe a camera and let’s take a holiday without leaving the space we write in.