In this six-week fiction workshop, we'll dive deeply into our own work and others'. Each participant will workshop a short story or novel excerpt (max. 25 pages), with discussions focusing on elements of fiction such as story structure, character development, exposition, and dialogue. We'll zoom in on practical revision ideas that help students to meet their individual writing goals, including submitting for publication. We'll also engage in craft exercises such as close readings of published short fiction. We'll meet on Zoom from 7-9 PM ET each Tuesday night between June 11 and July 16. Come prepared to be thoughtful, kind, and open-minded!

While confessional poetry has trained us to read the voices of poems as the voices of the poets that wrote them, the reality is often much more varied and complex. When our subconsciouses begin to steer the ship, they tap different sides of our psyches and identities—both the ones we craft and the ones we bury—to navigate the fog sprawled before us. The whole is always more than the sum of its parts. The same way poets and their tools evolve, so do the slippery and evasive sirens singing our ships to wreck. Enter the persona poem.

Contrary to what this term may suggest, the persona poem is where the poet removes one mask to become another. They emerge of necessity when, paradoxically, we need to remove ourselves from a poem, a character, a voice, to fully see our reflection through the eyes of who we are most arrested by, disarmed by, tortured by. As Jane Hirschfield notes, “This is one paradox of originality: the willingness to become transparent, to offer oneself to the Other, whether in the world of things or of art, leads toward rather than away from individuality of expression.”

We will follow this concept wherever it may take us—to its eventual conclusion, a rock covered in splintered wood, or stranded on a new patch of sand—through the eyes of the Other. Together we will read and discuss works by Hirshfield, Hanif Abdurraqib, Sara Borjas, Louise Glück, James Tate, Randall Jarrell, Margaret Atwood, John Darnille, Patricia Smith, Kazim Ali, Jamila Woods, Lucille Clifton, Jeanann Verlee, Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, and more or maybe less—depending on where our energy takes us, we’ll follow.

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