Remember why we started writing? That one afternoon at school or later that night when it was 3 AM and we couldn’t sleep because everything was HARD and TERRIBLE and we just needed to write our way through it all? In this five-week, online workshop, we’ll return to all the worst places (okay, to some of them) to flip every table and turn over all the rocks and examine each facet of those terrible spaces that we have survived through—that we are surviving in—to find the minute details we can love and hold on to. We’ll create and workshop poems that allow for terror and beauty, rage and wonder, and pain and love to coexist, and magnify both the struggle and the joy of our lives lived. Class sessions will meet synchronously via Zoom, and assignments, poems and critiques will be shared via Wet Ink.
Workshop Details
Chiwan Choi is a poet, writer, publisher and lifelong seer of ghosts. He is the author of four full-length books of poetry: The Flood (Tia Chucha Press, 2010) and the Daughter Trilogy, three books that explore his lost daughter as ghost: Abductions (Writ Large Press, 2012), The Yellow House (CCM, 2017) and my name is wolf (2022). He is also the author of multiple poetry chapbooks, including Time Out of Space and lo/fidelity lovesongs. He wrote, presented and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker throughout the course of 2015 as part of his ongoing examination of the meaning of a book and the conjuring and nurturing of ghosts. Choi has published his poetry, fiction and essays in numerous journals and magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, ONTHEBUS and Poem-A-Day. He is a partner at Writ Large Projects, an indie publishing and media company.