The day started with the specialist course. This year, again, I took the poetry course run by Alison Chisholm. We were following the course of the year with poems following the seasons, and today was Winter so Alison gave each of us a glittery snowflake as a prompt, with instructions on how to use the spaces and spokes to generate a poem. We also discussed diary poems, and how these can cover different time periods (hours, days, months).
I had been planning to take the Marketing and Promotion short course, but decided against it in the end. Also on offer were Writing Intimate Scenes, Poetry from Dreams, and Illustrated Picture Books. None of these appealed so I gave them a miss and parked by the coffee machine instead and chatted to other delegates for a while.
Later in the afternoon I took my only workshop of the week Writing for Competitions, run by Ingrid Jendrzejewski. She's won a prodigious amount of competitions since she started entering in 2014, including winning a free trip to Swanwick last year, but she's a nice as she is prolific so it's difficult to hold it against her! She hadn't expected many people to come, but the hall was packed. She rattled through a lot of useful information in the hour, and could really have done with being given a short course slot. At the end of the session she gave us a writing prompt and instructions to write a story or poem, taking into account the guidelines she'd given us, for a competition with a deadline of Wednesday.
Our evening speaker was children's author Cathy Cassidy. I've enjoyed my time at Swanwick a lot more since I stopped feeling like every speaker was compulsory, so I gave her a miss in favour of curling up in bed with a book, and another early night.