Wednesday, September 11, 5:00 – 7:00 PM 
Fold Poetry In: A Generative Poetry Workshop with Mark Wunderlich Tuition: $100

What happens to our minds when we commit to a daily practice of writing?  How do we change when writing poetry becomes a habit as opposed to a periodic creative occasion? How do we prioritize our own inner life and its relationship to language in a world that does not necessarily value introspection and quiet creativity?  In this generative workshop, we will look at and conduct a series of exercises and poetic practices designed to fold poetry into the lived life.  Part pep talk, part how-to manual, this class will demystify the ways in which one creates a life in poetry and makes room for poetry in a life. 

Wednesday, September 18, 5:00 – 7:00 PM 
(Soma)tic Poetry Rituals with CAConrad Tuition: $100

Please join us to explore how (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals can help us see the creative viability in everything around us. CAConrad has created writing rituals using the night sky to design homemade star constellations, another ritual to dream with crows, and many others, from talking with trees and ghosts, translating Shakespeare's sonnets with crystals, and coping with the destroyed wilderness of our planet.

Saturdays, September 28, October 5 & 12 1:00 – 3:00 PM 
What is Mythopoesis? with Cynthia Hogue Tuition: $150

Mythopoesis offers poets an approach to material that is “too hot” or “too close” to handle directly. It creates a framework that offers us the perspective we may need to write a particular and perhaps challenging poem. Mythopoetics is not a poetic genre but a mode of writing, an approach to the world we live in, but refracted through the lens of our inherited stories. What does mythopoetics add to a poem, and what does it make possible for the poet to explore? The answers—like the questions—will likely be inconclusive, multiple, and open-ended. I ask each of you to bring a perspective that amplifies our thinking about the relevance of myth to art today.

Wednesday, October 16, 5:00 – 7:00 PM 
Daily Poetics, Daily Practice with Brandon Som Tuition: $100

In this class, we will consider the possibilities for a daily poetic practice by looking at innovative writers and their innovative approaches to daily writing. We will look at Bernadette Mayer’s list of journal ideas, Kimiko Hahn and Harryette Mullen’s tanka journals, William Carlos Williams’ writings on his prescription pads, José García Villa’s practice of versifying found prose, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Instagram posts, and Edgar Garcia’s poetic record of his nightmares after reading the journals of Christopher Columbus. We will talk about journals, notebooks, pillow books, commonplace books, and social media posts. Based upon our readings, we will also participate in writing exercises—generating new work and sharing some of it out loud.

Saturdays October 26 & November 2, 10:00am – 12:00 PM 
Against Disease: The Poetry of Resilience with Pamela Uschuk Tuition: $100

How does one write about a diagnosis so enormous that it seems often beyond the imagination?  In this generative poetry writing intensive, cancer survivor and prize-winning poet Pamela Uschuk will guide writers through the challenges and opportunities of writing about life-threatening diagnoses.  Life-threatening diagnoses are ultimately humbling--not only for the patient, but for friends and relatives who are forced to face their own relationship to living and to dying. The workshop is open to everyone, including those with direct or indirect experience with difficult diagnoses. 

Saturday, November 2, 9:30am – 12:30 PM 
Writing with Earth: Finding Form in an Uprooted World with Gretchen E. Henderson Tuition: $120

From dust to dirt, sediment to soil: what lies underfoot reflects the human condition. Amid over-extractions of the Earth’s diminishing resources, resilient seeds persist, even replenish. In this writing workshop, we reimagine the place of earth in our words—poetry, nonfiction, fiction, between & beyond—seeding renewable possibilities through lines and sentences, paragraphs and poetics of place, to unearth care for what may otherwise be trampled. Where language lies fallow, let’s tend to native seeds and even weeds that may grow. 

Wednesday, November 6, 5:00 – 7:00 PM 
The Notebook with Roger Reeves Tuition: $100

In this workshop, we will look at Robert Haas’ ‘notebook’ poems and think about the form of the notebook. How might the notebook provide both a flexible and sturdy form for lyric meditation? What does a notebook form offer us as poets when we see our meditations as interconnected but not necessarily next to each other or the proximity between the meditations is looser? In this workshop we will close-read and begin writing our own Notebook poems thinking about what meditational material might want to reside in community / next to each other.