THE WORKSHOPS at KETTLE POND
2023 Workshop Descriptions
Christopher Citro
A Gathering To Write
A generative poetry session with poems and original prompts to help us get going writing poems! We’ll enjoy inspiration, including audio and video, from poets such as Susan Nguyen, Maya C. Popa, Vievee Francis, Cleo Qian, and others. I’ll provide a handout with poems and prompts we use in class, plus a bunch of others for you to enjoy and be further sparked by to write new poems!
Christopher Citro
The Power of Juxtaposition
A generative poetry session on the craft of using juxtaposition to help us find our poems and to energize our poems when they arrive. We’ll enjoy inspiration, including audio and video, from poets such as Arda Collins, francine j. harris, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and others. I’ll provide a handout with poems and original prompts we use in class, plus others for you to enjoy and be further stimulated by to write new poems!
Chen Chen
Happy Poems! (2 sessions)
Do they exist? If they do, can they be as good as the poems that wreck us? Can a happy poem wreck us? And how can we avoid sentimentality or is that a risk we just need to take? In this generative session–spread over 2 days–we’ll look at Ross Gay’s essay “Joy Is Such a Human Madness” (from his collection The Book of Delights) as a compass for our discussion and a starting point for writing about/from/through happiness, joy, and pleasure. Within the genre of happy poem, we’ll think about poems that celebrate love, sex, community, and connection of various kinds. We’ll examine some model poems by Ross Gay and others, including Czesław Miłosz, Derrick Austin, Jane Wong, Nikky Finney, and Yanyi. Come prepared to engage in jubilant experimentation.
Anaïs Duplan
Hybrid Forms Poetry
This generative poetry workshop is intended to illuminate the expanded potentials of working with hybrid forms, including but not limited to: auto-fiction, experimental poetry, auto-theory, and writing that incorporates visual arts. Participants are encouraged to consider how hybridity can reshape their own work in ways that inspire new lyric iterations.
Brian Hall
Datasets (2 sessions)
In this nonfiction workshop, the first session will be spent generating “datasets”–following the format used in The Stone Loves the World–and writing along the line between prose and poetry while looking at moments in the life of a person who is important to you (friend or family). The idea is to work backward through time, creating a set of moments involving that person. Each dataset cannot run longer than seven lines, but you can write up to ten of them. The first dataset is a recent moment, and the last is the first time you met the person, or your earliest memory of them. The second session will be devoted to feedback and discussion. This workshop is limited to 14 participants.
Mark Pawlak
Poetic Journals from Bashō to the Beats to Pawlak (2 sessions)
Spread over 2 days: the first to define the “poetic journal,” offer examples, and assign “homework”; the second to workshop poetic journals that participants have generated.
Kem Joy Ukwu
Short Fiction (2 sessions)
This workshop will focus on creating new short stories, including flash fiction, utilizing prompts and brainstorming strategies. The workshop will also include an approach of creating and/or clarifying goals and intentions regarding writing regarding revision. Questions that will be asked and discussed include: How can a writer build from an initial draft of a story and/or story idea? What are the goals of the writer regarding creating the short story and how can one revise work to align with one’s goals and intentions? During the workshop, participants would have the option of bringing their own short story excerpts that could be reviewed and discussed (the first two pages or the first page, double-spaced). In addition to the workshop, a 45-minute individual consultation (optional) would be scheduled and provided to review and discuss each participant’s short story, strategies for generating a story, and each writer’s creative and professional goals. This workshop is limited to 7 participants; 10-page maximum (double-spaced) for consultations.