In this two-session, in-person workshop, we’ll turn our attention to essential elements and techniques that can make place a more resonant part of our writing: weather and seasons; history and the passage of time; vocabulary and vernacular; and detailed sensory description. Each session will include both craft discussion and prompt-based generative writing and sharing. We’ll go from blank page to sketches to more fleshed-out drafts, guided by memory and imagination. Hometowns, distant planets, that particularly disastrous vacation—all are fair game. We’ll be liberal when it comes to style and form—whatever shape your voice takes is welcome! This workshop is appropriate for beginners and more experienced writers alike. No outside prep or homework necessary; just get ready to explore terrain new and old and undiscovered. Class sessions will meet at 144 Montague St.
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
Alicia Mountain is the author of Four in Hand (BOA, 2023). Her debut collection, High Ground Coward (Iowa, 2018), won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in the Nation, Guernica, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest and American Poetry Review. Mountain was a Clemens Doctoral Fellow at the University of Denver and the 2020–2021 Artist in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. She serves on the board of Foglifter, an LGBTQIA+ journal based in the Bay Area. Mountain lives in New York City, where she is an assistant teaching professor in the Writer’s Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn.