Two New Writing Workshops: Nonfiction and Poetry
Classes designed to help those who want to sharpen their writing skills, discuss craft and project ideas, and find potential new writing groups
Publish Your Personal Essay in a Newspaper
What: Local newspapers don’t only publish news articles written by their reporters. They also often accept short reflections and publish them as guest columns, usually on their opinion pages. These reflections have the power of any personal essay as they relate a lived experience to people who maybe know nothing about the respective event, culture, or people involved. What’s great is that you don’t have to be a published author to submit these pieces (though they can too), as newspapers often try to publish a range of voices, especially if their experiences have a contemporary relevance. As an example of such a guest column, here is a piece I published in the Bangor Daily News in Maine.
In this class, you’ll learn 1) how to pen a five-hundred- to seven-hundred-word first-person essay that will stand up to an editor’s fact checking, and 2) when and where to submit it to have the best chance of seeing it published. To do this you’ll first identify an experience you’ve had that’s related to a conflict. This experience can be from your perspective as a combatant, a relative of a combatant, a witness, a victim, or any other connection to armed conflict. Experiences that have contemporary relevance are valuable but not required. Below is a list of conflicted-related holidays/days of recognition. Participants will then workshop their pieces with one another to get them ready for an audience.
By the end of the class, you will have crafted a powerful and succinct personal story that you can submit to a newspaper or other outlet if you wish.
Upcoming holidays/days of recognition:
Jul 27—Korean War Veteran Recognition Day
Aug 4—Coast Guard Birthday
Aug 7—Purple Heart Day
Sep 11—Patriot Day
Sep 18—Air Force Birthday
Oct 13—Navy Birthday
Nov 10—Marine Corps Birthday
Nov 11—Veterans Day
Dec 7—Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day
Dec 13—National Guard Birthday
Who: Erin Rhoda has worked at newspapers in Maine for sixteen years. Most recently she was the investigative editor at the Bangor Daily News where her team’s work propelled new state laws. She has won many awards. In 2018 her peers named her one of Maine’s ten most trusted journalists. She graduated summa cum laude from Colby College with a major in English and later won the national George J. Mitchell Scholarship to earn her master’s in creative writing from Trinity College in Ireland.
When & Where: Online: Mondays, July 7, 14, & 21 from 7 – 8:30p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $85
Poetry and the Consciousness of War
What: Modern poetry is an art based in consciousness, one that finds its music in working with the patterns of how we think and process information, our own experience, and also our experience of information.
This month-long workshop and discussion class will focus on how poets have used formal strategies to address the information and experiences of war. Using prompts from the instructor, students will produce weekly poems responding to or using craft-strategies used by poets discussed in the first part of each class session, share their poems in class, and get feedback from the instructor and classmates in workshop discussions.
Reading List (2-4 poems per week)
Week One: Yehuda Amichai, Alan Dugan
Week Two: Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Jarrell
Week Three: Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara
Week Four: C.K. Williams, Marianne Moore
Class Process:
Students will email instructor Word files or PDFs of poems workshop five days before class, and instructor in turn will email class packet of assigned readings and workshop poems to think about before class sessions.
Who: David Blair has been teaching poetry workshops for thirty years. He is a poet based in Somerville, Massachusetts. He teaches poetry in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of five books of poetry (Ascension Days, Friends with Dogs, Arsonville, Barbarian Seasons, and True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems) and a collection of essays, Walk Around.
When & Where: Online: Tuesdays, July 8, 15, 22, and Aug. 5, 6:30 – 8:30p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $100