Workshops

1-DAY WRITING WORKSHOPS

These workshops include lunch at 1 p.m.

Sensing Our Selves, Finding Our Frames: Perception & Possibility through Writing

DATE: Saturday, June 5, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. FACULTY: Marya Spont-Lemus

TUITION COST: $110 What shapes who you are and what you notice? What values and influences are—or do you wish were—embedded in your writing? What questions and tensions do you want to explore, for an audience or for yourself? Through guided reflection as well as open-ended exercises, we will zoom in and zoom out, to examine our own perception and experiences (and those of our characters) and how seemingly simple details might connect to larger structures and histories. Activities may focus on description, point of view, setting, texture, layering, and scale, with particular attention to how we frame and reframe, make and break patterns, and probe interconnections and causality. This workshop will center on writing, while drawing upon concepts and tools from various creative forms; however, no previous writing experience is required.

Writing Personal History

DATE: Saturday, June 12, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

FACULTY: Jack Ridl TUITION COST: $110 All of us were taught “big history”: students learn about World War II, but not what it was like having a father who was the captain of an African American company, nor what it was like for his wife, wondering if he would return. This workshop will provide a variety of ways to get in touch with your own history—the people and events that had an impact on you. The memories can be as traumatic as experiencing a war, as poignant and lasting as baking cookies with your grandmother. As the poet Garrett Hongo said, “We think we remember, but we really, deeply remember when we start writing in ever expanding detail.” Workshop time will be spent experimenting with a variety of ways to explore your history through writing. All types of writing are welcome, and no previous experience is necessary.

MARYA SPONT-LEMUS is a Chicago-based writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Among other endeavors, she writes short fiction and personal essays for print, performance, and exhibition; interviews literary artists; and continues to revise a draft of her first novel. Across her work, she strives to enable a more empathetic and just society.

JACK RIDL’s latest collection is Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Wayne State University Press). His last three books received national poetry book of the year awards, and his collection Against Elegies was selected by then–Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins for the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award. A winner of the Gary Gildner Poetry Award, Ridl was honored by the Literary Society of West Michigan for his “lifetime of work for poetry literacy,” and the Poetry Society of Michigan named him “Honorary Chancellor,” making him only the second poet so honored. He and his wife, Julie, founded the Visiting Writers Series at Hope College. More than 90 of his former students are now published authors, several having won national first book awards. In the words of the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, Ridl “is a superstar in the realm of compassionate, transporting, life-changing poetry.”