LOOPSHOP. A workshop with poet Rebecca Sharp

PLEASE NOTE: In association with the Centre for Energy Ethics there is ONE FULLY SUBSIDISED (free)place available. Intended for someone who would be prohibited from attending otherwise, this can be claimed (first come, first served) by emailing

About the workshop

A workshop with poet Rebecca Sharp, drawing from themes explored by her new collection Long Field Loop (Tapsalteerie). When so much of moving forward includes looking back, the poems in Long Field Loop make space for making amends – where land, humans and more-than-humans explore patterns of experience in times of reckoning. Set within the wider context of late-stage capitalism, seismic global unrest and climate crisis, Sharp’s poems consider how we find our feet again, the recovery of values and voice, what we must lay to rest and how we carry on.

Unspooling all of this, the workshop – a Loopshop – will explore geologic and other expressions of time, energy, layers, patterns, cycles, interconnectedness, disruption and repair. We’ll consider the way themes and events seem to keep going around, recurring again and again – until they don’t. Through a series of bespoke poetic exercises, we’ll identify loops we want to break for the sake of individual and collective progress; and those we want to reinforce or renew.

No preparation or previous writing experience required: the exercises will inspire newcomers and seasoned writers and artists alike. Please bring your own preferred writing materials.

Presented in association with the Centre for Energy Ethics and the Centre for Poetic Innovation (University of St Andrews).

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Rebecca Sharp is a writer (poetry, plays, interdisciplinary projects) from Glasgow, now based in Fife. Poetry includes Long Field Loop (Tapsalteerie 2024) and Rough Currency (Tapsalteerie 2021), which explores the poetics of oil and the imagination, receiving a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature, and an Art of Energy Award. She was Artist in Residence with the Centre for Energy Ethics (University of St Andrews) 2022-2024. Collaborations have been shortlisted for the Scottish Landscape Awards and the Brush & Lyre Prize for Multimedia Poetry. Her play The Air That Carries The Weight (Stellar Quines theatre company) explored the lore and landscape of Argyll alongside the life and work of archaeologist Marion Campbell, performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.

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About Long Field Loop:

“…an extraordinary, utterly unique collection, exploring the faultline between science and poetry, and proving, in doing so, that science in the right hands can be a form of song. This intelligent, resourceful book is an antidote to the Anthropocene – hugely informative, hugely readable, written to remind us of the beauty and fragility of our relationship with the natural world.” – John Glenday

“Benefica. Medicinal magic. This is what we experience as we enter Rebecca Sharp’s Long Field Loop. A work so kitchen table intimate that, reading it, we feel intimately connected, warming our cold edges among a circle of friends that includes humans, geodes, birch trees, otters, and peat. Sharp’s is the warmest kind of magic. Long Field Loop is more than a book, it’s an invitation to a party. Beyond the river and through the canyon together we enter a circle of pine. When the morning comes, and we return home, Sharp presses into our hands a party favor, a warding charm, a sacred reminder, we depart from this book knowing, as she says so insistently, we still want to be here.” – Amanda Yates Garcia, author of Initiated: Memoir of a Witch, host of the Between The Worlds podcast.

“Long Field Loop is a disrupted locus of somatosensory cartographics, geographic awareness and a telegraphic topography beating across landscapes of conscience and the ‘bite-marks’ of time. Loops and reverse loops spool, punctuated by relentless rhetorical iterations and re-iterations: a Greek chorus of calumny and the sciences. …an archipelago to dislodge expectation, whose frequencies of ice floe and peat creak in the inner ear of disaster. It is also an offering to beleaguered hope.” – MacGillivray

“…a cosmos channelled through the rhizomatic structure of everything everywhere all at once. Intimate and expansive, inventive, expressive, this is poetry as a (re)search for meaning and honest implication; and the reader is folded directly into its eco-poiesis. Financial futures and pine needles, tapirs, blanket bog, sea otters, and prehistoric star-gazing parties; Sharp animates the academic with vibrant interconnection and offers new patterns of thought and practice across any imagined divide.” – Samuel Tongue

Pre-order Long Field Loop here.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton's Close, Edinburgh, United Kingdom