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| LOSING YOUR POETIC VOICE With Francesca Abbate Thursdays, May 15, 22, & 29, 6:30-8pm $75/70 for members THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL: NEW METHODS FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY, BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR With John Lehman Sunday, May 18th, 1-4pm $30/25 for members PLACE: AN ENABLING FORCE IN WRITING With Catharine Malloy Saturday and Sunday, May 24th and May 25th, 1-4pm $50/45 for members TRANSFORMING ENERGY: SUMMER WORKSHOP WITH ANTLER Saturdays, June 7-July 26, 1-3pm $150/145 for members LOSING YOUR POETIC VOICE With Francesca Abbate Thursdays, May 15, 22, & 29, 6:30-8pm $75/70 for members Imaginative writers often speak of finding a voice, of evolving a style of diction and syntax that feels somehow uniquely personal. But why not try out different voices? Why not lose your voice, at least temporarily, and play around with adopting something new? In this workshop, we'll try out a series of different stylistic modes-chatty, pedantic, taciturn, witty, gushy, clipped, mellifluous, oracular. We'll read a variety of models and write poems that are both mono- and multi-voiced. We'll consider ways to expand our repertoire, to not be the same. Francesca Abbate received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in May 2002. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Indiana Review, Field, Poetry Northwest, Permafrost, Green Mountains Review, The Journal, and others. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the William Harrold Memorial Poetry Award. She has taught Creative Writing for ten years at various locations, including Beloit College, UWM, and the University of Montana. From 2000-2002, she served as Poetry Editor for The Cream City Review. THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL: NEW METHODS FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY, BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR With John Lehman Sunday, May 18th, 1-4pm $30/25 for members Do you have a whopper of a story you want to tell the world? More than just helpful writing tips, this session will provide you with five methods for gathering and structuring material and the means to best hook the reader. You will also determine the pivotal scene that will create the greatest dramatic climax. You will not only learn what to include and what to exclude (making the pre-writing task of gathering material more doable), but leave the workshop with an action plan and timeline for accomplishing your goals. This class is appropriate for both beginning and advanced writers, for those who have begun their manuscript as well as for those who have thought about it but have not yet started. Lehman shows you how to utilize character development, scenes, thematic conflict, drama and dialogue to give shape and meaning to events of your life and make your story interesting to others. Autobiographical writing is not reserved for the famous or those who are writing a family history for their descendants. It's an exciting way to "see the pattern in the quilt"—to make sense for yourself out of the diverse elements of your own experience and to be as actively engaged within your own story as is the reader who eagerly turns the page. John Lehman is a nationally published, award winning writer and poet with fifteen years experience teaching creative writing. He is the graduate of the Great Books Program at Notre Dame University and has a Masters Degree in Curriculum Development from the University of Michigan. He has presented writing seminars in dozens of cities throughout the country. He has been nominated for three Pushcart Awards (short story, poetry and creative non-fiction). He is also the founder and publisher of Rosebud, one of the fastest growing magazines of literature and art in America today. PLACE: AN ENABLING FORCE IN WRITING With Catharine Malloy Saturday and Sunday, May 24th and May 25th, 1-4pm $50/45 for members Discover place as an enabling force in your writing. Recognize, like Seamus Heaney does, "writing as a place in itself," suggesting writing has its own sacred space and place from which writers draw and pull perspectives. In a series of two classes, workshop participants will recognize the place(s) they are called to write about and to open various angles of vision in order to capture, dismiss or embrace a particular place with words. Participants may incorporate personal photographs, and journals, as props to help them journey to places that evoke possibilities for meaning. Catharine Malloy is a poet and an Associate Professor of English at Mount Mary College. She has written widely on the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. TRANSFORMING ENERGY: SUMMER WORKSHOP WITH ANTLER Saturdays, June 7-July 26, 1-3pm $150/145 for members Limited partial scholarships are available "The nub of the problem now is how to flip over as in jujitsu the magnificent growth energy of modern industrial civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and Nature and this continuing revolution of consciousness will be won not by guns or violence but by seizing the key images, myths, archetypes, ecstasies and eschatologies so life won't seem worth living unless one's on the transforming energy's side." Gary Snyder
This workshop will encourage writing that embraces and celebrates those key images, myths, archetypes, ecstasies and eschatologies-what goes deepest and highest for all of us, which varies from person to person. Participants will share their work with the class and receive detailed feedback on their poems from the instructor. Each class will begin with discussion of a poem that exemplifies a particular visionary realization of what poetry can do and say. The purpose of the course is to embolden creativity and help midwife each of us to the next level in the growth of our poet-souls. William Carlos Williams said of poetry that people "die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." Our goal is to discover what is found there and to manifest it in our own unique words and ways. Antler is the author of Factory (City Lights 1980), Last Words (Ballantine 1986) and Antler: The Selected Poems (Soft Skull 2000). He won the 1987 Witter Bynner Prize awarded annually "to an outstanding younger poet" by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City, and the 1985 Walt Whitman Award, given by the Whitman Association of Camden, New Jersey to an author "whose contribution best reveals the continuing presence of Walt Whitman in American poetry." Of Antler's poetry, Allen Ginsberg said: "More fineness than I thought probable to see again in my lifetime from younger solitary unknown self-inspired US poet—one of Whitman's 'poets and orators to come'." Antler was chosen to be Milwaukee's poet laureate during 2002-03. |