Unless otherwise noted, all workshops are held via Zoom.
Please email jswilliams1307@gmail.com to register.
Accepted forms of payment: PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, or mailed check.
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!
Franz Wright was born in Vienna, Austria and grew up in the Northwest, the Midwest, and California. He earned a BA from Oberlin College in 1977. His collections of poetry include The Beforelife (2001); God’s Silence (2006); Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004; Wheeling Motel (2009); Kindertotenwald (2011); and F (2013). In his precisely crafted, lyrical poems, Wright addresses the subjects of isolation, illness, spirituality, and gratitude. Of his work, he has commented, “I think ideally, I would like, in a poem, to operate by way of suggestion.”
This workshop will delve deeply into a number of Wright’s poems, including his themes, style, and perspective via active group discussion and writing prompts and some writing time to help you engage more directly with and be inspired by his work…putting his lessons into practice. And the class includes a 56-page handout!
From companion animals to creatures of the wild, non-human beings offer writers a powerful way to explore complex human themes—home, love, captivity, identity, and belonging. Whether through the gaze of a tank-dwelling amphibian, the mind of a parrot, or the body of a cow, the non-human perspective provides a fresh lens through which we can examine the world.
We’ll read works by poets spanning different literary traditions, exploring a diverse range of perspectives and approaches. Then, we’ll examine how these perspectives influence narrative strategies, atmosphere, and point of view. We’ll also how non-human perspectives can be used as a tool in our writing—depicting themes of behavior vs. instinct, the distance (or intimacy) that non-human narration allows, and how animal stories can reflect the human experience in unexpected ways.
As always, there will also be a variety of writing activities throughout and an opportunity to share your work with our small, safe group of wonderful poets! And the workshop includes TWO robust (over 50 pages each!) workbooks.
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!
In What Is Color in Poetry, Dorothea Lasky writes, “Color creates an expanse; a field, a shared formal field, with which to plant more shared components of the material imagination, a poem. Color makes this space bigger, this imaginative space more specific and bigger, gives it weight, makes it solid.”
The colors of a poem, whether they be precisely named or implied, will filter through you, just like the actual poem does, as if you, yourself, are a prism. Each hue has its own story to tell. And use of color or the lack of them can make or break your poem.
In this workshop, we will analyze a variety of poems with unique color focuses, including the abstract, nature, and the deeply human. Poets we’ll read include classics such as Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and D.H. Lawrence, as well as fresh contemporary voices such as Maggie Nelson, Donald Hall, Jenny Xie, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Marge Piercy, and Marvin Bell.
There will also be a variety of writing activities throughout and an opportunity to share your work with our small, safe group of wonderful poets! And the workshop includes a robust 40-page workbook.
Are you working on a poetry manuscript or hoping to start one soon? Whether you only have a handful of poems or a book draft, this intensive workshop will teach poets different ways to create a poetry manuscript from the ground up, as well as how best to target publishers. Whatever stage you’re currently at, the goal is to move from composition through ordering and polishing all the way to publication….in one winter! And it can start at any point….today or next month!
Further information is farther below, but here are the main highlights:
· A detailed 60-page workbook including everything from poem composition to collection formatting and publication, including 15 chapters, samples, and over a dozen exercises.
· Checklists, resources, templates, and activities to keep you moving forward.
· Six one-hour, one-on-one Zoom sessions over the winter to strategize together, discuss poems and ordering, and keep you on track.
· Ability to ask me questions over the entire summer.
· Both journal and publisher submission guidance, including cover letters and choosing the right publisher.
· (Optional): A professional critique of your complete collection (under 8,000 words)
Join award-winning poet, teacher, editor, and literary agent John Sibley Williams for this intensive summer-long 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.
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 collection, 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.
Workbook chapters include:
· How to Create and Maintain a Writing Schedule
· How to Create and Maintain a Poetry Journal
· Possible Structures
· Building Your Collection from Previously Written Work
· Finding the Threads
· Ordering Your Manuscript
· Polishing Your Manuscript
· Choosing the Right Title
· Epigraphs
· Formatting Your Manuscript
· Breaking Writer’s Block
· Submitting to Magazines
· How to Submit and Pitch to a Traditional Publisher
· Traditional Publishing
· Self-Publishing
· Checklists and Resources
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