Please Note: Workshop registration closes one week before the workshop date.
May 6, 2024, 7:00-8:30 EST “Empathetic Voices: Using the Stuff of Life to Navigate Multiple Perspectives” Investment $30.
May 13, 2024, 7:00-9:00 EST “Zine Poetry and Art” Investment: $50.
May 19 2024, 12:00-2:00 p.m. EST “Fragments and Fascicles: Stitching Short Forms Together” Investment: $70 includes kit fee.
June 3, 2024, 7-8:30 EST Poetry Reading featuring Creative Patina students. Free and open to the public.
May 6, 2024, 7:00-8:30 EST “Empathetic Voices: Using the Stuff of Life to Navigate Multiple Perspectives” Investment $30.
Art critic John Berger introduced readers to new “ways of seeing.” This workshop will allow you to explore new “ways of feeling.” Through focus on the persons, objects, and relics of everyday life, you’ll be given the opportunity to enter into the “body” and “experience” of others and give voice to the feelings and details of existence that arise. Our presentation will focus on persona poems and the empathetic voice. You will have time to experiment with multiple perspective poems after viewing photographs of Emily Dickinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Frida Kahlo and the objects of their life. We’ll offer lists and examples to help initiate participant ideas.
Deadline to register: Wednesday, May 1.
May 13, 2024, 7:00-9:00 EST “Zine Poetry and Art” Investment: $50.
Zines, small circulation self published works, offer writers and artists the opportunity to put their work into the world. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn to create a zine from a single sheet of paper, and how to settle on a theme for it. We’ll provide prompts for writing poetry or prose and for creating artwork to use in your zine. We’ll also talk about how you might distribute your zine.
Deadline to register: Monday, May 6.
NOTE: Date change! Still time to register!
May 19, 12:00-2:00 p.m. EST “Fragments and Fascicles: Stitching Short Forms Together” Investment: $70 includes kit fee.
In her late 20s and early 30s, Emily Dickinson gathered more than 800 of her poems into 40 fascicles, sewing stationary together with string. While some critics claim their ordering is random, others, like Dorothy Huff Oberhaus, argue that they form one major work. While we may not definitively understand Dickinson’s purpose, we can learn from the fascicles how to gather shorter poems together to create greater meaning by bringing them together.
This hands-on workshop will invite participants to generate a series of short poems–some may make use of forms such as the cinquin, haiku, or haibun–or image fragments. Following the generative part of the workshop, you’ll learn simple ways to sew their poems together, imitating the fascicles created by Emily Dickinson. You’ll have the opportunity to consider the order of the poems and how they appear on the page.
To ensure you get your kit on time, US folks, please register by Sunday, May 12. International folks, please register by Sunday, May 5.
June 3, 2024, 7-8:30 EST Poetry Reading featuring Creative Patina students. Free and open to the public.
All students from our workshops will be invited to an online reading. If you’ve never shared your work at a reading, we promise you’ll find it invigorating and inspiring!
We hope you will join us for one or more of our workshops. To sign up, please complete this form and send payment via PayPal (@[email protected]) or Venmo (@beverly-ArmyWilliams).
All workshops will be recorded, and the recordings will be available for one month after the workshop’s date.
Reparation Scholarships: Two full scholarships for BIPOC are available on a first-come, first-served basis. These scholarships are our acknowledgement that it takes extra time and energy to navigate the systemic racism in the creative writing and publishing industry. The scholarships are meant as reparation, not as an assumption of financial need. If you are interested in a scholarship, please email [email protected] to let us know.
Beverly Army Williams is a writer and mixed media artist living in the woods of Connecticut. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Strawberry Moon Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Whale Road Review, Uppercase Magazine, and The Dandelion Review. Her solo visual art show “Grimm, Abstracted” recently appeared at The Thimble Gallery. She has taught for Tatter Blue Library, Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and Fiber College of Maine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico.
Joyce Hayden is a writer, visual artist, and a former university writing professor. An advocate for underserved populations, Joyce has led generative writing groups for battered women, teens at risk and survivors of abuse. She continues to facilitate online writing classes and has taught a weekly Ekphrastic writing class for over three years. Her chapbook, Lost Handprint, was selected for publication by The Dandelion Press in 2017. Joyce has taught classes at San Diego Writers Ink, Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Seaport Shores, and other venues. Her work appears in Al Jazeera English, The Yellow Arrow Journal, Manifest Station, and many other publications. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.