Do you find yourself overly influenced by the work of your favorite writers? Continually using the same words, phrases, opening and ending strategies? How do we avoid our personal writing ruts, and more importantly, how do we develop or hone our own voice? In this single-session, in-person workshop, we’ll interrogate the unintentional patterns in our lives as well as our poems. Through mindfulness writing and rewriting exercises and close readings of contemporary poets, we’ll deploy the therapeutic strategy of the heroic revision—rewriting the narratives of our lives (and the dialogues in our heads) by allowing the progress we make, in life and work, to inform our self-beliefs. Participants should bring at least 2–3 of their previous poems to the workshop.
We strongly encourage all in-person workshop participants to wear masks. Workshop participants may be required to wear masks as an accessibility accommodation for other participants or the instructor.
Workshop Details
Debora Kuan is the author of three poetry collections, XING (Saturnalia), Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press) and Women on the Moon (Word Works). Her work has appeared or is is forthcoming in Poetry, the New Republic, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review, ZYZZYVA and other magazines. She has worked on the editorial masthead of Poetry magazine and has taught at the 92Y as a teaching artist. She has also written about mental health and the mind-body connection for the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. She is currently the poet laureate of Wallingford, CT, where she lives and works remotely as the copywriting manager for the MIT Press.