Saturdays, October 26th and November 2nd, 2024, 10:00AM-12:00PM in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room.

How does one write about a diagnosis so enormous that it seems often beyond the imagination?  In this generative poetry writing intensive, cancer survivor and prize-winning poet Pamela Uschuk will guide writers through the challenges and opportunities of writing about life-threatening diagnoses.  Life-threatening diagnoses are ultimately humbling--not only for the patient, but for friends and relatives who are forced to face their own relationship to living and to dying.  In the two sessions, particpants will look at how other writers such as Jane Kenyon, Meena Alexander, Audre Lorde, Mary Tall Mountain, Christian Wiman, Michael Harper, Dean Young, Jennifer Franklin, Karen An-Hwei Lee, Rainy Dawn Ortiz and others have written about their own diagnoses and dire illnesses. The workshop is open to everyone, including those with direct or indirect experience with difficult diagnoses. Participants will receive writing prompts, will have time to write and share their work with other participants.

Wednesday, November 6th, 2024, 5:00PM-7:00PM in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room.

In this workshop, we will look at Robert Haas’ ‘notebook’ poems and think about the form of the notebook. How might the notebook provide both a flexible and sturdy form for lyric meditation? What does a notebook form offer us as poets when we see our meditations as interconnected but not necessarily next to each other or the proximity between the meditations is looser? In this workshop we will close-read and begin writing our own Notebook poems thinking about what meditational material might want to reside in community / next to each other.