APPS DUE: MAR 21: Poets Studio Spring Sessions | Apr 5 - June 14
Apps due March 21
One of the things I feel Poets Studio participants, regardless of experience and skill, can benefit from, is an extended concentration on only a few pieces over a couple months.
The theme for the Spring Sessions will be "Devotions." We'll focus on poems written "to" -- whether they're epistolary explicitly or dedicatiory. With a singular audience in place, Spring Sessions will progress as follows:
Sessions 1-3: Making. We’ll start from scratch on a few poems, developing strategies of imagination, research, trial and error, and writing several “test” drafts over several weeks.
Sessions 4-7: Noticing. Here we’ll begin to be attentive to what might be possible with various drafts of poems, in the writing process — noticing what they are doing and not doing, what they are implying and avoiding, and what they are potentially able to become, and what they can’t ever become (but might as well try it out to find out for sure), as we make more and more drafts.
Sessions 8-10: Changing. Someone else, not me, would call these last three sessions, Revision. The goal of the last three sessions is to continue making changes, narrowing the possibilities, all the way until your poem or poems are “finished.”
My hope is that, after the ten Spring Sessions, you’ll have freshly experienced a process of writing, including writing together each week during Poets Studio gatherings that gives you new tools, skills, and patience for writing your poems. The goal of the Spring Sessions is for everyone to finish 2-3 brand new poems, while we’re all in conversation with each other, and then to prepare these, as you see fit, to submit for publication in the fall.
To apply: Email six poems and a 100+ word description of your experience writing poems over the last five years.
Poets Studio: Spring Sessions (10 sessions): Monday studio meet 5:30-8pm (Pacific Time)
Monday Apr 5
Monday Apr 12
Monday Apr 19
Monday Apr 26
Monday May 3
Monday May 10
Monday May 17
Monday May 24
Monday May 31 (No Class)
Monday June 7
Monday June 14
An annual certificate program, the Attic Atheneum melds independent study under close faculty supervision, student receptions, public readings, and other special Atheneum events created around good food and great conversation, dialogue, and literary community.
Snow White. The Round Table. Persephone and Hades. From hybrid prose to web comics and blockbusters, fairy tales and legends are constantly retold across mediums. Why do we continue to relate? How do they help us find meaning in uncertain times? What can we borrow from these forms to examine the past and future in light of climate change, migration, and capitalism? In this course, we will study writers like Helen Oyeyemi, Carmen Maria Machado, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Joy Williams. Then we will begin our own stories, inspired by existing lore. If you are drawn to cross-cultural myths, obscure tales, or the idea of Rapunzel on Mars, this is the class for you.
In this class we will be exploring Ekphrastic Poetry and looking to painting, photography and music as our inspiration. Can ekphrastic poetry be more than a reflection or comment on a piece of art? Can it be more than a beautiful description of another piece of art? We will find out together through looking at the paintings, photographs, and music that has inspired great poems-- as well as writing our own. 
What happens when we expand our creative focus and let go of our expectations? In this workshop, we'll use writing practices and generative techniques, explore poems and strategies, all with the goal of completing the workshop with a handful of new poems. Can we find liberation from the pressures we place on ourselves and our work? Join the experiment and let's find out! 
This one-day generative poetry class is an introduction to help you write and examine your own work for revision. Using the four elements of Story, Structure, Music, and Imagination, poets will identify and attempt to balance these elements in their own work. We will use Gregory Orr’s essay “The Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” to examine and revise our own poetry. Prompts will be provided to encourage you to explore and deepen your understanding of each temperament. Reading: Gregory Orr, “The Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry."
Personal Essays and memoir represent some of the most adventurous writing today. Pushing narrative boundaries, utilizing traditional and nontraditional forms, this type of writing explores individuality and the minutiae of life unlike any other form. This workshop will help students explore the world of memoir and personal essay writing and understand both traditional and nontraditional narrative strategies available to them. Though the class will be run as a classic workshop, where students will submit their work to be reviewed in class, it will also combine craft lectures, outside reading, and in-class exercises. Students are expected to workshop twice. This will include their original essay submitted to class plus a revision. | Maximum: 12 writers 
Stories have component parts, and they interact. Starting with the basic building block of scene we’ll start with character and move step by step through the micro-levels of sentences, concrete detail, cause and effect, narration, and structure. Each week includes a close read of an excerpt of a published work and a discussion of specific craft elements. Participants will be invited to turn in work each week and can expect to develop a language of non-judgmental critique that will lead to a supportive, in-depth conversation about each other’s work. We’ll look deeply into what it takes to build a prose narrative, real or imagined, long or short. | Maximum: 12 writers
Eight weeks of writing and reading. Try your hand at characterization, dialogue, plot, finding the telling detail, playing with points of view. Develop a “writing practice” while generating ideas for short stories, memoirs, even novels.
In the Netflix anthology series Love, Death, and Robots, the future takes many forms. Cats survive the apocalypse while humans are extinct. Farmers fight an endless battle. Sentient yogurt takes over the world. Many of these episodes are adapted from short stories, writers envisioning a range of possibilities, given what they know of the past and the present. So, how do we imagine the future when the present feels like dystopia? What remains the same in a world of endless innovation? What has the potential to change? Through the work of writers like Rivers Solomon, George Saunders, NK Jemisin, John Scalzi, and Octavia Butler, we will examine the many paths humanity can take from here, for better or for worse. Then we will imagine the future in our own words. 
It Came from Outer Space: This class will focus on writing new poetry. In this workshop we will challenge our notions of ekphrasis by focusing our attention on sci-fi films to generate our poems. While the Greek term ekphrasis translates simply as ‘a vivid description’ of a thing, the long-established tradition of ekphrastic poetry opens the door to a wide range of creative approaches for poets to engage with a work of art in another medium. Ekphrastic poems utilize a myriad of forms and strategies, and they respond to, incorporate, investigate, embellish, interpret and/or reflect upon a vital work of art—usually either a painting, photograph, or sculpture. You will be expected to view one or more of the films from the list below as the source of artwork.
Here’s a workshop that can flow with the longer rhythms of your writing. A Saturday morning of each month, we’ll gather and share one or two poems in a comfortable but focused fashion. You choose the poem to share based on what feedback you are looking for; the poems could range from one you want ready to submit for publication, to an experimental piece that needs a supportive but critical eye. Along the way we’ll talk about craft and how to grow and sustain a fulfilling practice. Come ready to share your poems and insights and to carry generous feedback home to your writing desk. 
A house can be many things. A witness, a shelter, a prison. A house can hold multitudes. Family matters, domestic conflicts, psychological warfare, ants. What lives in a house? What stays together, and what falls apart? How do writers of the uncanny utilize the rooms and walls in a house? We’ve all heard of the haunted, weary house. But what about the liveliest house on the block? What does it have to say? In this workshop, we will explore the role of the house (and the many voices inside it) through short stories by Daisy Johnson, Mariana Enriquez, Samantha Hunt, Helen Oyeyemi, Amelia Gray, K-Ming Chang, and others. Then, with the tools we’ve gained, we will investigate this multifaceted space in our own work.