RC Weslowski

RC Weslowski Picture | Omniverse Project

RC Weslowski is the 2021 Zaccheus Jackson Nyce Memorial Award Winner, The 2016 Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award Winner and a Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and Victoria Spoken Word Festival Poet of Honour.  RC is a Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Champion, an Underground Indies Champion, A CFSW Team Champion, a Haiku Death Match and Nerd Poetry Slam Champion.  RC co hosts and produces Wax Poetic and Oh No Not Another Podcast podcasts.  RC is the Artistic Director for Hullabaloo: The BC Youth Spoken Word Festival and curator for Mashed Poetics, a quarterly spoken word and music mash up event that has been running for over a decade.  RC’s first book of poetry, “My Soft Response to the Wars” is out on Write Bloody North Publishing.  www.writebloodynorth.ca

History

History Prompt

Find a family photo, hopefully a family photo of you and your family. (But if you don’t have that, find one on the internet and a magazine at the library.)

Just find a family photo and then use that photo look at it and write a word blast.

For 5 to 10 minutes, just write down single words that are expressive of what you feel. This photo is about write down this word blast after 5 or 10 minutes, then I want you to circle your 10 favourite words.

And then I want you to use those words to start describing what happened just before that photo was taken or just after that photo was taken and make it sensory. Tell us how the sky smelled, tell us what the weather sounded like, and what the dirt felt like. Use your senses to get right in there and be very descriptive using your 10 words from your word blast. This can begin your origin story and investigation.

Craft & Writing

Craft & Writing Prompt

This writing exercise is an attempt for you to help maybe come up with new ways of speaking as well. A surrealism synonym generator, basically creating your own library list of words that are now crunched together, juxtaposed to make new words or new phrases.

You can do this by simply beginning by looking around the room and putting them together. Soap, risotto, Bible, lanterns, or you can go and rename objects that are in your room. A chair becomes a butter worshiping hot pot, your tongue is now perhaps a lisp blanket.

Make this library list and then begin to insert it into poems that you feel like you’ve already written or your first draft anyway, and use them to edit and make them more exciting.

Performance

Performance Prompt

The exercise that I invite you to just practice before you get ready to perform is called a diaphragm release exercise or lightening up. Now I’ve done it for a long, long time, so I can do it standing up or when I first started, I was just lying down on the ground. And this was a cloud exercise that we would do and it’s to help make your breathing less predictable. Because of the breath. The inspiration is unpredictable. It’s going to be exciting for you and for the audience. So all I do is just laugh and practice.

And that’s all I do. And it wakes me up and it enlivens me. And then it helps me step into that space of invitation to offer an invitation because I’m ready, and I’m excited. And so I encourage you to do that. Try it, try it in small doses. If it feels kind of scary, do it before a small performance and see what happens.

Poem