Week 1
POETRY WORKSHOP
Writing with Others
June 27–July 1 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Maggie Anderson
Course Description: We know that poems come from the imaginations, languages, and experiences of the poet. “A poem is the cry of its occasion,” Wallace Stevens wrote, and poets seem most often to locate their “occasions” in the raw material of their own lives. In this workshop, we will experiment with writing poems that require us to reach outside the circumference of our own immediate lives and selves into new forms and strange occasions. One way that poets are currently doing this is by using the written and visual texts of other poets, historians, scientists, painters, and photographers. Some poets are making poems by taking lines from other poets’ poems and patching them together (centos) or by erasing lines in others’ poems to leave what’s left as a poem of their own (erasures). Many poets use their original sources in conscious collaboration with other poets or with their own older selves. We’ll begin by looking at some examples of these poems. From there we’ll use our own experiences to engage in collaborations with others in order to discover what further we can say beyond the boundaries of what we know—or think we do. Flexible. (ages 18+)
Bio: Maggie Anderson is the author of five books of poems including Dear All, Windfall: New and Selected Poems, A Space Filled with Moving, and Cold Comfort. Anderson has also co-edited several poetry anthologies, including A Gathering of Poets and Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry About School. Her awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania councils on the arts. She served as the director of the Northeast Ohio MFA in Creative Writing (NEOMFA) from 2006-2009. The founding director of the Wick Poetry Center and of the Wick Poetry Series of the Kent State University Press, Anderson is Professor Emerita of English at Kent State University and now lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
PROSE WORKSHOP
Five Days, Five Approaches to Prose
June 27–July 1 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Jimin Han
Course Description: Whether you’re mulling around an idea for a story, essay, novel or memoir, or looking for traction on a work that seems to be missing something, engaging in varied narrative writing strategies may help you reach your goals. Each day we’ll consider contemporary pieces of fiction or nonfiction, try our hand at a craft-based writing exercise inspired by our readings, and discuss how your piece might develop. This will be a generative, supportive writing environment in which you’ll write and share with other writers. If you have work in progress, we will also find time to provide you with feedback from the group if you’d like. Flexible. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Jimin Han was born in Seoul, South Korea and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island; Dayton, Ohio; and Jamestown, New York. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Cornell. Her writing can be found at NPR’s “Weekend America,” Catapult Magazine, Poets & Writers Magazine, and elsewhere. A Small Revolution, her first novel, was among Entropy Magazine’s Best Fiction of 2017, Pleiades Editors’ Choice 2017, Buzzfeed’s 6 Binge-Worthy Literary Books of May, CNN’s Summer Beach Reads, and Electric Literature’s Ten Galvanizing Books About Political Protest. The Apology, her new novel, is forthcoming from Little, Brown and Co. in 2023.
Week 2
POETRY WORKSHOP
Writing about the Natural World
July 4–8 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Neil Shepard
Course Description: In this poetry workshop, we’ll discuss contemporary nature poems from a variety of literary magazines (including my own online magazine Plant-Human Quarterly), but our own poems will serve as the inspiriting core of discussion for this workshop. We’ll look at poems in all their complexity, from imagery and metaphor, to sonics and diction, to tone and rhetoric, and we’ll pay special attention to how these various poetic effects reinforce the content of a nature poem. The workshop atmosphere will be convivial but serious in purpose, and participants’ poems will be treated with respect. Throughout the week, we’ll consider writing exercises that might steer you toward new strategies and discoveries in making a poem. Generative. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Neil Shepard’s most recent book, How It Is: Selected Poems, was published in 2018 by Salmon Poetry (Ireland), and in 2019, he edited Vermont Poets & Their Craft (Green Writers Press, VT). His new collection, The Book of Failures, is due out in 2023. His poems appear in such magazines as the Harvard Review, New England Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and online at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and Poem-a-Day. He founded and edited for a quarter century the Green Mountains Review, and he currently edits the new literary magazine Plant-Human Quarterly. He splits his time between Vermont and NYC, where he teaches workshops at Poets House.
PROSE WORKSHOP
Point of View in Memoir: Playing with Perspective
July 4–8 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Apricot Irving
Course Description: The slow work of untangling our own stories can be an invitation to compassion and playfulness. In this workshop, we’ll hold a scene up to the light and examine it from as many angles as possible. Memoirs are often written from a first-person point of view; what happens when we step back and observe from a different vantage point? What new truths can be discovered about a moment we thought we understood? We’ll explore together how approaching an old narrative from a new perspective creates space for humility, nuance and complexity. Flexible. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Apricot Irving, raised in Haiti and the US, has taught writing across three continents. She reported from Haiti on post-earthquake recovery efforts for the radio program This American Life and her first book, The Gospel of Trees, received the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the founder and director of a renowned oral history project in Portland, Oregon, and the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her work has appeared in Granta, On Being, and Best American Science & Nature Writing. She currently lives in rural Oregon with her partner and two splendidly imaginative teenage sons.
Week 3
POETRY WORKSHOP
Sight and Insight
July 11–15 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Charlotte Matthews
Course Description: Flannery O’Connor established that, “learning to write is learning to see. Following her council, workshop participants will practice ways to see and resee both external and internal landscapes. Each day will adopt a distinct focus: trees, roots, water, stone, and air. Writers to be considered in this workshop include Elizabeth Bishop, Wendell Berry, Ross Gay, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ron Rash, and Natasha Trethewey. Generative. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Charlotte Matthews is author of four poetry collections, a novel, and a memoir, Comes with Furniture and People (finalist for Indie Book Award). Associate Professor at The University of Virginia, has been teaching non-traditional adult learners for the past 17 years. Her work recently appeared in Rattle, The American Poetry Review, Cave Wall, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Ecotone. She lives outside of Charlottesville and enjoys raising chickens, walking dogs, and knitting.
PROSE WORKSHOP
From Inspiration to Page: Our Creative Journeys
July 11–15 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Roy Hoffman
Course Description: Where does inspiration come from, and how do we seek it out? From the far corners of the globe, or just down the block? From transformational events in our lives, or the magic of our senses? And how can we translate that uplift, those insights, into essays and stories? In this prose workshop, for writers of all levels, we discuss the source of own inspirations, and set out — pen to page, or keystroke to screen — to compose images, narratives, and tales. Over the course of our week we’ll try our hand at generative writing, using images, the senses, memories, music, as take-offs for creative writing, either fiction or nonfiction, sharing with the group, for those who wish. We’ll also look closely at stories or essays participants offer for more focused critique, up to 8 pages, one per participant. Come prepared to enjoy a no-pressure, supportive, and, yes, inspiring writers circle, spurred on by that ancient wisdom, “mighty oaks from little acorns grow.” Stories, too. Flexible. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Roy Hoffman is author of the new novel The Promise of the Pelican, an intergenerational, literary crime novel of today’s multicultural South, the novels Come Landfall, Chicken Dreaming Corn, praised by Harper Lee, and Almost Family, and the nonfiction Alabama Afternoons and Back Home. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall St. Journal, and he was a journalist and speechwriter in New York before returning south to reside in Fairhope, Ala., near his hometown, Mobile. Roy has received awards in both fiction and nonfiction, is on the faculty of Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing, and is a returning Chautauqua prose writer-in-residence.
Week 4
POETRY WORKSHOP
“Poetry as Autobiography”
July 18–22 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Sue Ellen Thompson
Course Description: The subjects for poetry that attract so many of us—childhood, loss, love, and family relationships—often come from the events of our own lives. But how much should we reveal, and what should we hold back? In this workshop, we will look at some of the “confessional” poems that were being written in the 50s and 60s before turning to contemporary American poets who write about their own experience in a way that transcends the confessional impulse. Then we will use their work as models for writing our own autobiographical poems. Flexible. (ages 18+)
Bio: Sue Ellen Thompson’s sixth book of poetry, SEA NETTLES, was published in 2022. Her work has been included in the Best American Poetry series, read on National Public Radio more than a dozen times by Garrison Keillor, and recently won a Pushcart Prize. A two-time Pulitzer nominee, she teaches poetry workshops at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD and lives on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake. She received the 2010 Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association.
PROSE WORKSHOP
The Redux Fairytale
July 18–22 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Vi Kni Nao
Course Description: To create a new story is to remake an old story new. In that essence, this generative fiction workshop will renovate, refurbish, modernize, remodel, and possibly upgrade the old fairytales (such as Cinderella, Hansel & Gretel, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, etc) into their potential timeless 21st century, with a new set of literary wardrobe and boundary, vernacular attires, and coeval, technological conditions, and circumstances. The rewrite will alter the fiction writers’ motivation from originality to novelty, fashioning a mythological universe that defies traditional approaches to storytelling, paving a daring path towards emblematic compulsions. Writers will unexpectedly, through the compelling practice of playfulness and lightheartedness, form their adaptable narration into a labor of fiction that invites authentically impulsive exploration and an intensely invigorating engagement for their readers. Generative. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Vi Khi Nao is the author of six poetry collections & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her first play, Waiting for God, is out of Apocalypse Party in January 2022. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.
Week 5
POETRY WORKSHOP
Writing about the Difficult and Finding Grace in Poetry
July 25–29 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Nicole Cooley
Course Description: Poet Lucille Clifton said she hoped her poems would “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” In this workshop, we will investigate how to write such poems. We will explore how to tackle difficult subjects in our work—from loss and grief to politics and war. How do we find our way into the most crucial and hard subjects of our lives and shape them into poems? We will write new poems, read and talk about poetry and poetics, and workshop poems. Flexible. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and is the author of six books of poems, most recently OF MARRIAGE (Alice James Books 2018) and GIRL AFTER GIRL AFTER GIRL (Louisiana State University Press 2017). She has also published three chapbooks and a novel. Her poems have appeared recently in POETRY, SCOUNDREL TIME, TUPELO QUARTERLY and PLUME. She has been awarded the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her new projects are two manuscripts of poems, MOTHER WATER ASH and TRASH: POEMS. She is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York and lives outside of NYC with her family.
PROSE WORKSHOP
Essaying Essays
July 25–29 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
David Lazar
Course Description: In this workshop, we’ll explore the essence of nonfiction’s most vibrant and elastic form. The essay has been at the heart of nonfiction writing since Montaigne first published his in the sixteenth century, and is having what some call a “golden age” in the United States now, a swell of interest that goes beyond what we’ve seen before and is creating new forms of the essay, what some call lyrical, graphic essays, epistolary, short forms, long forms, fractured forms . . . all of them though somehow tied to the thrilling desire at the heart of the essay: to speak intimately, to ask difficult questions, to stumble upon coincidences and the fortuities of language that take us places we had no idea we’d end up when we sat down urgently needing to write something in prose. We’ll read some varied examples of the form (Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf, C.K. Chesterton, Nancy Mairs, Hanif Abdurraqi, Lia Purpura. . . . ) do some exercises, and the last 2-3 days workshop the varied work produced by workshop members. Flexible. (Ages 18+)
Bio: David Lazar is the author of thirteen books, most recently Celeste Hom Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age and the anthology Don’t Look Now: Writers on What They Wish They Hadn’t Seen. He is also the author of the essay collections I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms, Occasional Desire, The Body of Brooklyn, and the prose poem collections Who’s Afraid of Helen of Troy and Powder Town. Ten of his essays have been named “Notable Essays of the Year” by Best American Essays. Lazar was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Nonfiction in 2016. He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika, in its twentieth year, and co-editor and founding editor of Ohio State University’s 21st Century Essays imprint, the only exclusively essay imprint in the country, which will publish its thirtieth title next year. He has taught for over thirty years–at Ohio University and Columbia College Chicago, and created the undergraduate and graduate nonfiction programs at those schools. He is originally from Brooklyn, NY.
Week 6
POETRY WORKSHOP
Writing Lives, Writing Poems
Aug. 1–5 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Jim Daniels
Course Description: Poets at all levels sometimes struggle to make their poems clear, to translate their lived experiences to the page in ways that are accessible to general readers, particularly when they are writing about very personal, emotional subjects. This workshop will focus on helping you achieve a greater degree of clarity while writing about personal topics without losing the precision of poetic expression. Writing assignments will involve looking at and responding to poems that deal with autobiographical material. Flexible. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Jim Daniels’ latest book of poems, Gun/Shy, was published by Wayne State University Press in 2021. Overall, he has authored thirty collections of poetry, six collections of fiction (most recently, The Perp Walk), edited or coedited six anthologies (most recently RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music), and written four produced screenplays. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His books have won four Michigan Notable Book Awards, the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, two Tillie Olsen Creative Writing Awards, the Milton Kessler Award, and three Gold Medals in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, among others, and his films have won awards in film festivals around the world. He has read his poetry on Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion,” and poet laureates Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and Tracy K. Smith have all showcased his writing as part of their work to bring poetry to average Americans. During his long career, he has warmed up for singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, had his poem “Factory Love” displayed on a race car, and is sending poetry to the moon in 2022 as part of the Moon Arts Project. A native of Detroit, he currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
PROSE WORKSHOP
Between Sentiment and Scorn: Writing Truthfully and Ethically about Family
Aug. 1–5 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Kristin Kovacic
Course Description: Much of our hard-earned knowledge is forged in the cauldron of family life. But examining and writing truthfully about people we love is fraught with complications–we can pointlessly romanticize; we can do real harm. This workshop will explore ways to approach nonfiction writing about family so that it is accurate, sensitive, ethical, and meaningful to a larger audience. We will explore many fine essays that generously model the challenges and rewards of this difficult work, and we will make several attempts of our own to make purposeful art from our most intimate relationships. This is a generative workshop; no experience necessary. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Kristin Kovacic was born and lives in Pittsburgh, PA. Her essays have won the Pushcart Prize and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, among other awards, and have appeared in Brain, Child, Full Grown People, Table, and other publications. She is the co-editor of Birth: A Literary Companion, the author of the poetry chapbook, House of Women, and the essay collection History of My Breath. She has taught nonfiction writing in the graduate programs of Carlow University, Chatham University, and for many years at the Writers Center at Chautauqua Institution.
Week 7
POETRY WORKSHOP
Poetry of Transformation
Aug. 8–12 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Todd Fleming Davis
Course Description: In this workshop, participants will engage with and examine poetry of transformation. Poems of magical change, of mythical renovation, of everyday conversions and once-in-a-lifetime revolutions. We will write our own poems of transformation, learning to use the tension and friction such change inevitably requires. We will discover how conversion leads to both joy and grief, to the writing of ode as well as elegy. Generative. (ages 18+)
Bio: Todd Davis is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, most recently Coffin Honey and Native Species, both published by Michigan State University Press. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. He teaches environmental studies and creative writing at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.
PROSE WORKSHOP
Aug. 8–12 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Course Description: This generative workshop will be based on the idea of curation. How can we orient toward research and pre-writing in a way that opens up plenty of space for playful revision? We will think about the curation of essays through objects, sounds, images, and experiences. We will consider structure and flow the way we might talk about an art exhibit. By preparing an installation through visuals and objects, we will have the opportunity to walk through and modify the literary experience we are trying to create on the page. Generative. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Aisha Sabatini Sloan is an essayist and multimedia artist. She is the author of three essay collections, Borealis, The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit. The latter was nominated for an Iowa Essay Prize, and won the 1913 Press Open Prose book contest as well as the CLMP Firecracker award for nonfiction. Her book-length essay, Borealis, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. Her essays have been widely anthologized, and appear in publications such as the Offing, Guernica, the Paris Review, and Obsidian. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Michigan Writers’ Program.
Week 8
POETRY WORKSHOP
The Ode: Poetry of Celebration, Reverence, and Surprise
Aug. 15–19 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
John Repp
Course Description: Originating in a Greek root meaning “to chant” or “to sing” and first performed 2500 years ago during the earliest Olympic Games, odes celebrated the god-like feats of Greece’s finest athletes. They weren’t “just” poems, but productions that fused dance, the pluck and strum of stringed instruments, choral chants, and singing. In this workshop, participants will infuse their poems-in-progress—or poems composed during the workshop—with athletic intensity, playful rhythms, and memorable song. We will read (and read aloud) from our own work, as well as from the odes and anti-odes of poets such as Pindar, Lucille Clifton, Walt Whitman, John Keats, Pablo Neruda, Horace, Ross Gay, Sharon Olds, and Frank O’Hara. We will conjure a home for praise, reverence for the hidden as well as the awe-full, and the surprise of authentic insight. Flexible. (Ages 18+)
Bio: A poet, fiction writer, essayist, and book critic, John Repp grew up along the Blackwater Branch of the Maurice River in southern New Jersey and has lived for many years in Erie, Pennsylvania. His most recent collections of poetry are Cold-Running Current (Alice Greene & Co.) and The Soul of Rock & Roll: Poems Acoustic, Electric & Remixed, 1980-2020, published by Broadstone Books.
PROSE WORKSHOP
Journey Through Fictional Forms
Aug. 15–19 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Rion Amilcar Scott
Course Description: Depicting our busy and noisy world through fiction often requires taking on different forms, sometimes in the same work, like slipping on new disguises, and personalities. In this generative workshop, we will look past traditional narration and try on differing cloaks: for example, the flash, the epistolary, the satiric, found forms, etc. We will read works that play with form and then create new pieces during meditative free writes. Participants will be encouraged to re-think their free-written pieces through the lens of form. By the end of the week, participants will have explored and discovered new approaches for their narrative experiments. Generative. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You (Norton/Liveright, August 2019), a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and winner of the 2020 Towson Prize for Literature. His debut story collection, Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His work has been published in places such as The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, Best Small Fictions 2020 and The Rumpus, among others. His story, “Shape-ups at Delilah’s” was published in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020. He was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland and earned an MFA from George Mason University where he won the Mary Roberts Rinehart award, a Completion Fellowship and an Alumni Exemplar Award. He has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writing Conference, Kimbilio and the Colgate Writing Conference as well as a 2019 Maryland Individual Artist Award. Presently he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.
SPECIAL PROSE WORKSHOP
Rewriting the Climate Story
Aug. 17–19 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Derek Gladwin & Naoko Ellis
Course Description: Throughout human existence, storytelling has shaped societies, influencing personal, sociocultural, educational, and public conversations that impact how we currently live and imagine our futures. Creating and communicating the language of stories to ourselves and others enhance our innate voices and can empower us to engage in greater empathy, compassion, and possibility. It’s not a far stretch, then, to propose that storytelling might hold a powerful sway in addressing one of the most significant challenges of our lifetime: the climate emergency.
This workshop invites participants to explore our own relationships to the climate emergency and the roles our personal and social stories play in this process. Over three days, participants will self-reflect on the stories of climate justice, creating and rewriting some of those narratives, while also considering some of the social and environmental challenges impeding action. Topics covered will include the storying process, empathy, understanding of the climate emergency, adaptive leadership, and social action. By the end of this workshop, participants will develop and write their own climate story that can then be applied to their personal and professional lives.
Bios: Derek Gladwin, PhD, is an author and educator committed to exploring transformations in culture and society through environmental, narrative, and arts-based education. He is the author of several books, including Ecological Exile and Rewriting Our Stories, and teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia.
Naoko Ellis, PhD, is a professional engineer, educator, and environmental consultant. She is curious about how learning with and from “others” – crossing the disciplinary boundaries – can inform and frame the complex societal problems we face. She has led large-scale funding projects in Canada, published papers on carbon capture and biomass utilization, and currently teaches engineering at the University of British Columbia.
Week 9
POETRY WORKSHOP
Creative Reading
Aug. 22–26 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Sean Singer
Course Description: The reader is the stunt double for the writer. The reader tries to understand the writer’s intention and find openings to enter the poem. The writer is the stunt double for the reader. The writer tries to anticipate how a possible reader will encounter the poem sometime in the future. Practicing the skills of the reader while writing, and those of the writer while reading, reinforces both reading and writing. The poem is an inflection point between critique and celebration. Reading with the intention of bringing the self to that inflection point, recognizing the portal there, and stepping through—that is the writer’s job. Flexible. (Ages 18+)
Bio: Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022). He runs a manuscript consultation service at www.seansingerpoetry.com
PROSE WORKSHOP
Writing is a form of care
Aug. 22–26 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Hilary Plum
Course Description: Can writing help us care more? Care better? How can writing create new opportunities for readers and writers, for people, to care for one another? In this workshop, we’ll consider writing as a form of care, and we’ll explore how care takes form in writing. Often we’re inspired to write something because of how deeply we care about a loved one (or sometimes a stranger), a cause, an event in history and those it continues to affect, a past or future version of oneself, an injustice, a moment or a person who was ignored or forgotten, a community, a place that’s vulnerable or changing, a way we’ve struggled when we cared about something but didn’t know what to do. We’ll explore these experiences together and consider what caring writing might be like and what effects it can have. We’ll think about the relationships between care, empathy, and responsibility. We’ll start with the questions and writing you care about. This workshop will be flexible and focused on creative nonfiction (we welcome writers new to that genre, too). (Ages 18+)
Bio: Hilary Plum (she/her) is the author of several books, including the essay collection Hole Studies, the novel Strawberry Fields, and the work of nonfiction Watchfires. A collection of poetry, Excisions, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2023. She teaches fiction, nonfiction, and editing & publishing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program, and she is associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. Recent work has appeared in Granta, American Poetry Review, College Literature, Fence, and elsewhere.