Grackle artwork by artist Brandon Sharp.
“Reading, writing, discipline—is that it, then? I’ve left for last the most important and obvious yet most often overlooked or underestimated part of any writing practice: living one’s life attentively.”—Carl Phillips, “My Trade Is Mystery”
“Try new things that will surprise you as you work for the joy of the process.”—Brenda Hillman
“In the journal…I create myself.” —Susan Sontag
Are you in the middle of a project and looking to get “unstuck”, or simply needing a creative boost to fuel your writing practice?
Leave your critic at the Zoom door and come write with me!
In this generative, 8-week class open to ALL writers, we’ll examine how the elements of poetry—the line, the image, language, and form—can help us live more attentively and thus open creative possibilities to us, no matter what genre(s) we’re currently working in.
We’ll read all kinds of poems—epistolary poems, ekphrastic poems, list poems, incantations, elegies, odes, and many more—and then with guided prompts, we’ll draft our own responses: letters never to be sent, our travels through paintings and photographs, lists of longings and regrets; we’ll spellcast, praise, obsess, confess, and invent our own forms in the process. We’ll create all kinds of raw and strange new material, the seeds of future micros, flashes, full-length stories, hybrids, or poems!
Sharing is encouraged (but not mandatory). Bring a blank book and a pen and a willingness to take risks.
Elisabeth Adwin Edwards’s poems have appeared in The Tampa Review, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, B O D Y Literature, Pedestal Magazine, Posit, and elsewhere; her prose has been published in HAD, CutBank, On The Seawall, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets. A native of Massachusetts, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and teen daughter in an apartment filled with books. Find her on Twitter/X at @eadwinedwards.