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.
This workshop will delve deeply into a number of Voigt’s poems, including her themes, style, and perspective, often focusing on landscape, animals, identity, gender dynamics, and death, via active group discussion and writing prompts and some writing time to help you engage more directly with and be inspired by her work…putting his lessons into practice. And the class includes a robust 51-page handout!
The focus of this session, “Dear America,” involved political and cultural poems that explore their relevant, necessary themes through speaking directly to the reader or via epistolary (letter poems, such as “Dear…”).
We will delve deeply into a wide variety of poems from Ada Limon, Claude McKay, Maya Angelou, Danez Smith, Denise Levertov, and others via active group discussion, writing prompts, and some writing time to help you engage more directly with and be inspired by their work…putting the lessons we learn into practice. And the class includes a robust handout!
From food to family, the weather to spirituality, giving thanks to taking stock of your life, the holidays mean different things to different people. We’ll read works by poets spanning different literary traditions, exploring a diverse range of perspectives and approaches, to see how they view the holidays, including traditions and rituals and family dynamics, as well as culture and a touch of politics. We will read poems from the likes of Jane Kenyon, Joy Harjo, Galway Kinnell, Rae Armantrout, Ted Kooser, Longfellow, and many others.
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 a robust 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
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!
Using a rhetorical device known as ekphrasis, the poet engages with a painting, drawing, sculpture, or other form of visual art in hopes of expanding on its meaning. Poetry about music and dance might also be considered a type of ekphrastic writing.
Edward Hopper's work, spanning oil paintings, watercolors, and etchings, predominantly explores themes of loneliness and isolation within American urban and rural settings. His most famous painting, Nighthawks (1942), exemplifies his focus on quiet, introspective scenes from everyday life. Hopper's technique, marked by a composition of form and use of light to evoke mood, has been influential in the art world and popular culture. His paintings, often set in the architectural landscapes of New York or the serene environments of New England, convey a sense of narrative depth and emotional resonance, making him a pivotal figure in American Realism.
In this workshop, we will analyze a variety of poems with unique approaches to exploring Hopper’s work, including the abstract, nature, and the deeply human. 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 60-page workbook.
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!
Similar to the goals of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), the aims of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you!
Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work.
What This Workshop Provides:
· 30 Days’ Worth of Writing Prompts
· A professional critique of all 30 poems as you send them, be it one each day or all 30 at the end of the month
· Ability to ask John writing questions any time during the month