2025 WORKSHOPS

10:55 - 11:55 with Anthony Cody

The archive is often in libraries, museums, history books, and the internet. However, that is an archive that is often at a distance and potentially diminishes the wealth of archival knowledge and artifacts that we carry in our life. This is the archival self of oral histories, photo albums, and the footprints we knowingly and unknowingly leave in the world. In this generative session, we will explore the many variations of archive and archival artifact, and generate creative work that honors the archival self.

10:55 - 11:55 with Brynn Saito

What is an ancestor? How does calling on our ancestors—from human and more-than-human realms—enrich, ground, and challenge our poetic practice? In this workshop, we’ll explore a range of poetic forms—epistolary, ecological, documentary, lyric, experimental—that create frameworks for exploring our own hauntings and hauntedness. We’ll listen for the silences that exist beyond language’s expressive scope. We'll describe the silence. Kim Hyesoon posits a “poetry of hearing” in which the poet listens for the voices of the dead and guides their spirits into the afterlife. What does such an orientation make possible? You are a future ancestor. What do you have to say?

10:55 - 11:55 with Sands Hall

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!  Shakespeare writes, and as an actor speaks these lines—You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout!—the audience hears, in those vowels and consonants, the storm whirling around and within King Lear. Of course such aural purpose and power is not limited to theatre; all poetry is meant to be read aloud. We get to hear when a series of Ts may tickle, a couple of Ds deaden, or a long O mourn. In this workshop, we’ll examine how poets create sounds that reflect and deepen what their works address; prompts allow you to purposefully play with these ideas in your own poems.

3:55-4:55 with Annie Finch

Reading aloud, chanting, creating, revising, and generating new poems, we will journey through the dancing meters of our language. As we consider poetic meter in its full diversity, consciousness alters and our brains open into a whole other mode of poetic creation. This delicious metrical adventure may uncover unexplored magical potential within your own unique poetic voice—and provide you with tools that will continue unfolding within you for a lifetime.  Optional preparatory reading list: prepare.anniefinch.com

3:55 - 4:55 with Karen Terrey

What are some techniques for responding to current events that we are experiencing in our poems? Finding agency and handling the immediacy of the material can feel overwhelming.

Poems by poets we admire that manage history and hope will be our guides to find brave approaches to the subject. The first part of this workshop explores the craft of powerful narrative and lyric poems. We’ll read poems that integrate social / public experience with the personal. How does the poet enter the subject matter? How are poetic elements incorporated, such as voice, image, and form? We will consider choices the poet makes such as who is the audience, who is the speaker, and what is the conceit? What other choices can we make in our own poem writing as response to current and historic events?

The second part of this workshop will be a generative writing session. Using the poems we’ve read as models with provocative prompts, we’ll draft one or two new poems. You’ll leave with new ideas of how to handle challenging and charged material.

3:55 - 4:55 with Diane Pendola

Join Diane Pendola, published author and Gestalt Awareness Practitioner, in uniting Gestalt Awareness Practice with the love of writing.  Gestalt Awareness Practice is a form of active meditation that enhances our capacity to be present to ourselves and to our world.  It can vitalize the writing process by providing a form by which to make contact with our experience, to enter it more intimately and to express it through the writing process. Diane is particularly interested in using this form to contact those dimensions of ourselves that are reflected in the natural world. 

Bring pen, paper and curiosity to this hour long workshop.

“Diane and I have been colleagues and friends for many years studying and developing Gestalt Awareness Practice. Her depth of presence, humor and heartfulness create a wonderful field of support where people can discover their relationship to spirit, to world and to the depths of their own humanity.  Her devotion to understanding and unfoldment, combined with her passionate commitment to honor all forms of life, bring integrity and a breadth of view to whatever she does.”

Christine Stewart Price, internationally recognized teacher and developer of Gestalt Awareness Practice