ALL WORKSHOPS ARE HELD VIA ZOOM
TO REGISTER FOR ANY WORKSHOP, EMAIL jswilliams1307@gmail.com
Zoomed out? Grab your favorite journal and get out into the world—of poetry. In this self-paced workshop, you’ll become a poetic field-agent, immersing yourself in the physical world in whatever way you can.
You’ll read poets who draw their inspiration from a deep sense of place (and the people they meet there), you’ll explore their use of craft elements, such as imagery and diction, and then, you’ll write in response to the places you visit during your “fieldwork,” whether that’s the Brooklyn Bridge, a beach at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, or walking down your street to 7-11.
The detailed 50-page workshop booklet explores how to write nature/eco poetry, how to keep a nature journal, nature poetry examples and discussion points, writing prompts, and much more. And the best part is…you can do this on your own schedule!
What This Workshop Provides:
· A robust Field Notes Booklet for us throughout the month
· Strategies on how to create and maintain a nature journal
· Plenty of writing prompts to kick start the imagination
· A professional critique of up to 10 nature poems you during the month
· Ability to ask John writing questions any time during the month
About the Workshop:
Join award-winning poet, teacher, editor, and literary agent John Sibley Williams for this intensive three-hour workshop that will take you all the way from inspiration to publication! This workshop is for poets ready to organize their work into a collection, as well as working toward journal and book publication.
Are you interested in organizing a chapbook or poetry manuscript? This intensive manuscript workshop will teach participants different ways one can begin to compile a poetry manuscript. Expect to view manuscript samples and discuss techniques that can be applied to the process.
We will explore all the ins-and-outs of organization and publishing a chapbook or full-length, from writing toward a given theme to setting and keeping to creative deadlines to learning how to submit smarter, not harder. Poets will be guided through a series of lessons and hands-on activities that each focus on a different aspect of creating, structuring, and finally publishing a new collection.
Topics include selecting the best title, focusing on your first and last pieces, finding the thematic threads in your writing, organizing the entire collection so that it reads smoothly, deciding which structure works best for you, and submitting individual pieces to magazines and the book as a whole to publishers and contests.
Learn how to:
· Set writing goals and make creative action plans
· Make your work stand out
· Get more acceptances…and faster
· Submit smarter, not harder, to both journals and presses
· Discover the thematic threads in your writing and how to weave them across a collection
· Reshape previous poems to fit the themes and style of your collection
· Order poems within a manuscript for cohesion and flow
· Write powerful introductory and closing poems for your collection
· Choose the right book title, poem titles, and epigraphs
About the Workshop:
To keep you consistently inspired, writing, and honing your craft, and to keep you engaged in a passionate poetic community, this month-long workshop series is aimed at helping you see your poems in a new light, broadening your vision, and improving your mechanics. Topics likely to arise include syntax, lineation, sound and rhythm, tone and mood, use of imagery, balancing the personal and universal, and other rhetorical strategies.
We will meet in a small, intimate, trusting group in which we can be honest and supportive of each other’s work. Each poet will compose one new poem each week, and we will start each session by reading and lightly critiquing it as a group. You will also receive intensive written feedback on each poem from me prior to the session. We will then move on to mini-lessons, fresh prompts, and hopefully some writing time!
Each week you will receive an inspiring seed idea designed to trigger the creation of a poem, share ideas about the process of writing poetry, workshop one of your poems, and receive feedback from the workshop group. Then, at the end of the week, I will give you a detailed response to your poem – with praise for the places where your poem is evocative and powerful, along with suggestions for revision where the poem has not reached its full potential. My goal is to give you a deeper understanding of poetry, a deeper love of language, and a stronger mastery of the techniques which make a modern poem work. I look forward to being a catalyst to help you take the next step in your writing!
About the Workshop:
Zoomed out? Scheduling conflict with most workshops? Do you simply prefer to work at your own pace? In this self-paced workshop, you’ll study the ekphrastic form, immersing yourself in the world of art and poetry and how they converse.
Using a rhetorical device known as ekphrasis, the poet engages with a painting, drawing, sculpture, music, or other form of art in hopes of expanding on its meaning. Ekphrastic poets analyze the original artwork, explore symbolic meanings, invent stories, and even create dialog and dramatic scenes. The artwork will often lead the poet to new insights and surprising discoveries about the very nature of artistic creation and conversation.
In this intensive, self-paced workshop, we will explore the many facets of ekphrasis through poetry/art/song analysis, active discussion, and a progressively challenging set of writing activities that create and foster conversation among multiple art forms.
You will study diverse ekphrastic poems from Lisel Mueller, Lawrence Raab, Valerie Martinez, Blas Falconer, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Frank O’Hara, Terrence Hayes, Gina Williams, Ocean Vuong, and others to see how they successfully explore fresh, unexpected methods of artistic translation and conversation.
The detailed 40-page workshop booklet explores how to write ekphrastic poetry, poetry examples and discussion points, writing prompts, and much more. And the best part is…you can do this on your own schedule!
THE WORKSHOP INCLUDES:
· A robust 40-page booklet to use throughout the month
· Multiple writing activities for each chapter
· A professional critique of up to 10 ekphrastic poems during the month
· Ability to ask John writing questions any time during the month
About the Workshop:
In the words of Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, “Forms are not locks, but keys. They don’t just open doors; they can start a journey and ultimately determine where you land.”
A poem can contain many elements to give it structure. Rhyme, meter, sound, repetition, experimentation, and so many others bring us back to poetry’s roots in traditional oral forms of storytelling. And there are so many profound reasons why traditional forms have survived the centuries, inspiring new poets and evolving to fit modern modes.
In this intensive, independent study workshop, you will explore the many facets of the haiku, haibun, sonnet, ghazal, pantoum, villanelle and golden shovel forms, focusing on our personal relationships with sound and rhythm and refining our relationships with form and content. You will learn the rules, yes, and when best to break them, fostering a new understanding of and appreciation for these unique poetic approaches.
AIMS:
· to introduce the conventions of the seven traditional forms and how these rules can support your own themes, experiences, and ideas
· to introduce a number of strategies to get into a traditional poetry writing ‘headspace’
· to equip you with creative techniques to generate initial ideas and images
· to develop your ability to shape your initial ideas into strong first drafts
THE WORKSHOP INCLUDES:
· A robust 80-page booklet detailing all seven forms
· Multiple writing activities for each chapter
· A professional critique of up to 10 traditional form poems during the month
· Ability to ask John writing questions any time during the month
About the Workshop:
Cento, erasure, and black out poetry are each unique forms of “found poetry” wherein a poet takes an existing text and creates something wholly new through recontextualization. From wildly weaving lines from your favorite poets into your own unique, multi-layered poem to erasing, blacking out, or otherwise obscuring a large portion of text to spark new meaning, “found poetry” may be used as a means of collaboration, creating a new text from an old one and thereby starting a dialogue between the two, or as a means of confrontation, a challenge to a pre-existing text.
Such hybrid poetics can be a powerful form of linguistic and political resistance!
In this hands-on, experimental, generative, self-paced workshop, you will study these varied forms of “found” poetry, drawing inspiration from news stories, political documents, and canonical literature, in order to recontextualize what has come before so as to understand, challenge, reshape, and better engage with the world around us.
THE WORKSHOP INCLUDES:
· A robust 42-page workbook
· Multiple writing activities for each chapter
· A professional critique of up to 10 found poems during the month
· Ability to ask John writing questions any time during the month