A poem is both song and story. In fact, ancient Italians called their poems, sonata, little song. A poem is the voice of our most intimate self. Poetry is the private history of the heart. Have you ever thought of telling your life’s story through a poem? 

In this class, we will interrogate and praise memory. We will study poems of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, Sharon Olds, and others. And using prompts that will include favorite songs from your childhood, or different aspects of your lives, family photographs, cherished objects (what kind of poems and memories can your coffee mug inspire? you’d be surprised!), and even photographs of your pets, we’ll work on crafting poems that evoke memories and images while telling your truth and story. Together, we will create an atmosphere of community, joyful laughter, togetherness, and a space for vulnerability. Come join us.  

This workshop focuses on connecting with yourself and finding and/or enriching and/or stretching your voice. What is voice in poetry? How do we access/find and develop/enrich it? We will write and talk about writing. The workshop consists of both theoretical and applied elements with a strong studio/writing component. We will talk/discuss/write about our consciousness, mind, the multiplicity of language, connection, speech registers, imported voice, polyvocality, inner space, the senses, and other elements/phenomena as creative tools in the process of voice creation/construction. Each topic/theme will be paired with corresponding reading material. It’s useful for both beginner and advanced poets.

The literary world is obsessed with notions of “originality.” We only need to look at the language of criticism to see evidence of this. When we want to commend a work, we call it “unprecedented” or better yet “inimitable,” as though it has no lineage at all and will produce none. But why should a work unable to bear literary progeny be so valued while imitable (fertile) work is judged unfavorably?

In our workshop, we will flip the script. We will read and write works that are generous and generative: works that do not deny their predecessors and in turn offer themselves up for endless adaptation. Our sources of inspiration? Myth, history, literary legacy, earth other!

Some works we might consider are The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark, Sons of Achilles by Nabila Lovelace, Wake Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin, Coming through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, “Madame Bovary’s Greyhound,” by Karen Russell, “A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin” by Kevin Brockmeier, and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” by Jorge Luis Borges. This is an open-genre workshop.

If you’ve ever struggled with your creative process, constantly imagining you’d arrive at your best subject matter by squeezing your mind like a lemon, this workshop could be for you. This course’s design is to cause generation, but also to build more critical and expansive generative habits. We read poetry and critical works which ask us to tear down inherited brackets on how we perceive, and then workshop every poem as though its “final” iteration is inside of it already. We read on the subject of the cliché as an emblematic example of how thoughts, images, and feelings not really our own sneak into the ways we express and organize our realities and our imaginations.

The premise of the class can sound a little “heady,” but I argue much contemporary work often sneaks a particular “heady” genius through what at first seems given about it. I think the best way to let our poems rise is to challenge how we’re trained to perceive while giving diverse craft choices the attention they deserve as the objective bounds of the poem.

Rachel Carson said, “there are countless ways to think and write about what we call ‘nature,’ many of them urgent, but nature writing, as defined by publishers and historical precedent, ignores all but a few.”

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In Vesper Flights, Helen MacDonald advocates for more nature writing, something she says will draw more attention to what is happening to our natural world: “We need literature more than ever; we need to communicate what losses mean […] the landscapes around us grow emptier and quieter each passing year.

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In this workshop, these two quotes will be our guiding principles as we dig into writing about the natural world. We will think about the way we can expand our definition of what constitutes “nature writing.” We will also look for ways to push against the sentimentality that is often braided into nature narratives, searching instead for authentic emotion and narratives that surprise us. This workshop is intended for the nonfiction writer.

Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” This perhaps aptly describes the process of writing a novel—a long, difficult, and often fraught task—but it also underscores the exciting potential novels have to portray great swaths of our complex lives and experiences.

In this class, we will take a deep dive into workshopping your novels and the complex lives and experiences they reveal. We will address how to revise and deepen character, setting, voice, and language, and we will undertake a nuts-and-bolts approach to structure, plot, and tension. Craft issues that emerge within your work will guide writing exercises and the published material we read. We will also spend some time discussing the publishing process and what agents and editors are looking for.

Be prepared to bring in a novel synopsis and to workshop the first 15-20 pages of your novel-in-progress.