Week One
Poetry Workshop
Discovery of Light: Movement & Writing
with Ruth Forman
June 24, 26, 28 • 8:30 – 10:30 a.m. • Ballroom, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Course Description: This workshop offers a combination of qi gong and creative writing as an outlet for expression. The movements of qi gong work in conjunction with the energy highways (meridians) that run throughout the human body, helping to open, smooth out and make even the flow of the body’s energies. Afterward, creative writing offers a space for participants’ genius to emerge. Participants connect with a focused personal power through writing, then share with each other in a unified space. This is a generative poetry workshop.
Participants should wear comfortable clothing, be able to take shoes off, and come to class prepared with something to write on and write with (pen/pencil and paper/notebook).
Bio: Ruth Forman is an acclaimed poet, author, and friend of words. She is the award-winning author of best-selling children’s books Curls, Glow, Bloom, Ours, One, and Like So, children’s book Young Cornrows Callin Out the Moon, and poetry collections We Are the Young Magicians, Renaissance, and Prayers Like Shoes. Ruth has received the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, The Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, The National Council of Teachers of English Notable Book Award, and recognition by The American Library Association. She is a former teacher of creative writing with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California as well as a longtime faculty member with the VONA writing program. Ruth is currently a professor at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. When not writing and teaching, she practices a passion for classical Yang family style tai chi chuan. You learn more about her at ruthforman.com.
Prose Workshop
Not So Fast
with Charlotte Matthews
June 24, 26, 28 • 1:15 – 3:15 p.m. • Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Course Description: This workshop will focus on slowing down and sharpening awareness of and curiosity about the natural world. Through practices of faithful observation, daily journaling, and honoring plain language, the workshop will invite you to re-see what surrounds you and invigorate you to weave that into story. Though primarily a generative workshop, you will also get a chance for feedback each day. Our mantra will be Mary Oliver’s assertion: To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
Bio: Charlotte Matthews is author of five poetry collections, a novel, and a memoir, Comes with Furniture and People (finalist Indie Awards finalist Women’s Issues). Associate Professor at The University of Virginia, she is the recipient of the Adele F. Roberts Award for Excellence in Teaching. A veteran Chautauqua writer-in-residence, she is committed to helping others recognize the power of their own voices and stories.
Week Two
Poetry Workshop
Getting Unstuck
with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
July 1, 3, 5 • 8:30 – 10:30 a.m. • Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Course Description: Often, we reach a point with a poem and realize it’s not quite done, but we don’t quite know how to move forward and finish it… Maybe it’s missing something, or maybe it just needs a greater attention to the language or structure. Or maybe, we are just stuck! In this flexible workshop, we will consider various strategies for revision—“re-seeing” our poems—from the conceptual to mechanical, such as experimenting with different forms and techniques. Sometimes, revision means we get unstuck with a poem, or we write an entirely new poem! The important part is being open to various possibilities for a poem to help us know which direction we want to go.
Bio: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator who works at the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They are the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. They are the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their most recent full length poetry book, Negative Money, was published in 2023. Their new chapbook, written with AI, is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content and won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest. They direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland and are a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant recipient.
Prose Workshop
Making Meaning While Writing from Life
with Chloé Caldwell
July 1, 3, 5 • 1:15 – 3:15 p.m. • Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Course Description: “Why would anyone care what I have to say?” This is a refrain I hear from writers and students alike consistently. In this generative writing workshop, students will learn techniques for making the mundane matter. When memoir is written from a place of hyper-specificity, it becomes universal. Chloe will provide in-class writing exercises, lectures, and readings for discussion. Students will leave with new work generated, more writer friends, exposure to new memoirists, and tools for moving forward in their own projects.
Bio: Chloé Caldwell is the author of four books: The Red Zone: A Love Story, the critically acclaimed novella, Women, and the essay collections Legs Get Led Astray and I’ll Tell You in Person. and Chloe’s next book, Trying, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. Her novella WOMEN will be reissued by Harper Perennial on June 4th, 2024. She is the co-founder of Scrappy Literary where she runs writing retreats and offers personalized support for writers.
Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Bon Appétit, New York Magazine’s The Cut, The Strategist, Romper, Buzzfeed, Longreads, Vice, Nylon, Salon, Medium, The Rumpus The Sun, and half a dozen anthologies including Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NYC and Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, and Sluts. Her essay “Hungry Ghost” was listed as Notable in Best American Nonrequired Reading. She lives in Hudson, NY. www.chloesimonne.com
Multi-Genre Workshop
A Summer of Wonder: Seeing Nature and Writing It in Chautauqua
with John Brantingham
July 4 • 8:30–10:30 a.m. • Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Session One | Week Two: Writing Nature and the Idea of Radical Wonder
Course Description: A summer-long class that combines in-person and online elements. We will be studying writing in the classroom at the Chautauqua Institution. Along with this, every day of the season, participants in the class will receive a video prompt for a poem and a prose piece. These prompts will be unified so students who do participate in this activity will have a complete first draft of a poetry or prose collection at the end of the summer. John Brantingham will help them to publish these collections in magazines and as book-length collections. Students who do not want to write will not have to. This is completely optional, so if you are interested in intensive writing or if you are just interested in the history and methods for nature writing, this is a class for you.
Bio: John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate and a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Mt. San Antonio College for 25 years. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-one books of poetry and fiction including his novella-in-flash Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press) and memoir-in-flash Kitkitdizzi with Ann Brantingham (Bamboo Dart Press). His series of poetry and prose books about nature is coming soon from Arroyo Seco Press. He is the founder and general editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder.
Week Three
Poetry Workshop
Poetry and Passion: Heartwarming Ideas for Poems and Picture Books
with Van G. Garrett
July 8, 10, 12 • 8:30 – 10:30 a.m. • Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Course Description: Participants will learn how to create poems with heart and soul. Additionally, they will explore writing territories, survey model texts, examine poetic forms, and they will discover writing possibilities for poems and picture books. Informative and informal, this generative workshop will allow writers and artists to learn in supportive, productive, and engaging ways.
Bio: Van G. Garrett is the author of thirteen books. His debut picture book, Kicks, is an ode to the flyest shoes and those who wear them, was published in 2022 (Versify/HarperCollins). His second picture book, Juneteenth, was also published by Versify/HarperCollins in 2023. Van’s updates and appearances can be found at www.vanggarrettpoet.com.
Prose Workshop
Our Lives, Our Stories
with Jimin Han
July 8, 10, 12 • 1:15 – 3:15 p.m. • Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Course Description: Our lives are rich with stories passed on from families and friends. How do you decide what’s material for a short story, novel, essay or memoir that anyone outside your family will want to read? How do you decide which details to keep and which to discard? How do you shape your narrative into work that lasts? In this generative writing class, we’ll engage in writing exercises that help us explore these questions, read excerpts of contemporary fiction and nonfiction to examine choices authors have made, and share our writing.
Bio: Jimin Han is the author of The Apology (Little, Brown and Co.), which was a 2023 Barnes and Noble Discover Pick, LA Times Most Anticipated Book, Vanity Fair Best New Book, and Apple Books Best of August. She is also the author of A Small Revolution. Additional writing of hers can be found at American Public Media’s Weekend America, Poets & Writers, Catapult, and other media outlets. She teaches at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, Pace University, and community writing centers. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she grew up in Providence, Rhode Island; Dayton, Ohio; and Jamestown, New York. Her work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.
Week Four
Poetry Workshop
Poetry in Motion
with Julianne Neely
July 15, 17, 19 • 8:30 – 10:30 a.m. • Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall
Course Description: