Bedscapes: a poetry and paper quilling workshop with Tea Gerbeza

Beds. We sleep in them, we dream in them, we rest in them, recover in them, are sick in them, feel pain in them, pleasure, safety, isolation. Beds are complicated places. Our relationships to our beds are complex, especially for those of us who are sick and/or disabled. Add in the complexities of pain—physical, mental, emotional, chronic, episodic, situational—and personhood. How does pain shape and inform identity? What is your relationship to pain like? What shapes would you give your pain if you could?

Poet and artist Tea Gerbeza will lead a workshop that blends poetry and paper-quilling. She will teach participants how to paper quill a few basic quilling shapes, and will invite participants to write original lines of poetry on paper strips based on prompts about pain—how one feels pain, thinks about pain, connects to pain. Then, participants will be encouraged to assign a shape to their pain from the few basic paper quilling shapes they’ve learned to make to create a paper-quilled bed (that doubles as a visual poem or poem-object). All materials needed for this workshop will be provided by the Art Gallery of Regina.

The workshop will be split into three parts:

1. Poetry and writing on strips

2. Learning to quill a few basic quilling shapes.

3. Building paper beds

Paper quilling is a dexterous artform, which may be inaccessible for some folks. A potential way to make it accessible is to invite someone along to collaborate in the creation of a paper-quilled bed; that is, have a pal do the paper quilling while you participate in poetry writing, gluing and dreaming up a bed design. We are open to suggestions on how to make paper quilling as accessible to as many folks as possible. Please let us know if you have any other access needs.

Bio: Tea Gerbeza (she/her) is a queer disabled and neurodivergent poet, writer, and multimedia artist. Most recently, she won the Ex-Puritan’s 2022 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for poetry. She also made the longlist for Room magazine’s 2022 Short Forms contest. Her new work appears in Wordgathering, Contemporary Verse 2, and in the anthology Nothing Without Us Too (Renaissance Press). Tea is a 2022 Zoeglossia Fellow. Find out more on teagerbeza.com.