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At the Poetry Barn, February 3rd to March 1st, 2020.
Teetering on the Tightrope: Walking the line between poetry and short-short fiction.
Sometimes you write a good draft of a poem; the images are fresh and the sound fluid, and yet it sits static on the page. Why? Perhaps the line breaks interrupt the flow of a good narrative. Or maybe what you’ve written needs the structure of couplets or tercets, or the random physical spaces poetry allows.
In this four-week, online generative course, we’ll approach prompts with a spirit of experimentation. You’ll ask yourself what expectations your writing elicits, the best ways to consider the work, and the best forms in which to explore it. We’ll study founders of the prose poem form, such as Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud; contemporary practitioners like Russell Edson and Mary Ruefle; and narrative poets such as Sharon Olds, whose work can—and sometimes does—go both ways.
At the Poetry Barn, an online workshop:
July 9 to August 5, 2018
Nasty? Why Thank you!
In this workshop, open to men and women, we’ll define “nasty,” writing poems that embrace our power and outrage. We’ll explore our sexuality with poems both subtle and in-your-face. Slut-shame. What’s that? We’ll write about motherhood, our mothers, and our lives without children. And we’ll say #MeToo to anyone who used our gender against us.
You’ll leave the workshop with drafts of four new pieces—poems, hybrids or even micro-fiction—and plenty of ideas for launching new work.
An online workshop at Gemini Ink:
June 3 - July 1, 2019
Microfiction Two: The Sequel
For students who took Tina’s “Go Small or Go Home” microfiction workshop in 2018, and for anyone who wants to experience writing microfiction.
We’ll look at masters of short-form writing, as well as prose poems and narrative poets, who bring us to the action quickly and hold us there with carefully honed, emotive language and images that resonate. Students will leave with four drafts of stories and plenty of ideas to generate new pieces.
At The Poetry Barn, an online workshop, January 7 to February 3rd
Using Personal Experience to Inform the Poem
In this workshop, you’ll employ all the scraps of life experience: journals, photos, remembered conversations—whatever you’ve stored up that needs to make its way into a poem. We’ll tease out memories with playful class exercises and look to poets, such as Sharon Olds, Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, and Michael Dickman, who know how to pick at a wound and make it art. We’ll let emotion guide us to the best possible form while listening for rhythm, encouraging humor, and paying careful attention to image as it influences, colors and serves as an emotional placeholder in our work.
When the workshop concludes, each student will have drafts of four poems that are at once specific to the writer and resonant to the reader.
At Gemini Ink, an online workshop,
June 4 to July 2, 2018
Go Small or Go Home: The Art of Microfiction
When a story is this short, a writer must choose each of her 300 words (or less!) like she’s mining for diamonds. In this workshop, we’ll look at narrative poets and prose poets, while studying examples of masters of the microfiction genre. You’ll learn to use rich, unexpected language while honing in on the moment that offers the greatest impact. You'll finish with four drafts of microfiction and plenty of ideas for launching new pieces.
At the Poetry Barn, an online workshop:
January 8 to February 4, 2018
Opening the Attic Window
Some poems are non-starters. You have an idea and a few words scribbled on a napkin, yet when you sit down to write, the poem refuses to take shape. Perhaps it’s not the words on the napkin, but the napkin itself that will launch your poem.
Using everything from fortune cookies to visual art, in this workshop, we’ll search for unexpected ways to tunnel into your poems, while allowing the writing to steer us to its best possible poetic forms, including micro-fiction and hybrids.