Program Description
Event Details
This program is brought to you courtesy of a partnership between Michigan Writers and the Traverse Area District Library. You can register for this event by either registering with the library below OR registering with Michigan Writers on their website.
“…Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
–Henry James
Taught by award winning poet Joy Gaines-Friedler, this workshop will focus on getting started.
We’ll look for inspiration in poetry and flash-prose, including micro-memoir (scenes that swoop-in, in 250 words, to show us a flash of knowing about the writer and the human condition). We’ll do quick exercises to create possible material to work with. We will look at published pieces in order to discover, among other things, where the lines of genre blur. Although poems, including prose poems, and the lyric or micro-memoir take different forms on the page (and, yes, form informs meaning), the impetus to write is about emotional clarity.
There will be no judgment. You’ll go home with a piece of writing of your own, a handout of examples, and with prompts to inspire you to create meaning through whichever form you choose. Above all else, we’ll put together a little madness of our own.
What we’ll do:
- Guided memory exercises in the form of lists.
- Close readings of poems, lyrical and prose-like.
- Close read of a flash micro-memoir by Caitlin Horrocks
- Meaningful, constructive, hopeful discussion throughout.
- You’ll leave with some writing of your own and a handout for reference and modeling.
Joy Gaines-Friedler is the author of four full-length books of poetry including the award winning Capture Theory, plus a chapbook, Stone on Your Stone, co-winner of the 2021 Friends of Poetry Chapbook Prize. Joy teaches poetry & memoir as a visiting writer in university classrooms and for non-profits in the Detroit area, including, among others, Freedom House Detroit where, pre-pandemic, she taught poetry to asylum seekers from western & northern Africa, for the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) through the University of Michigan, where she taught male “lifers,” and for Common Ground, where she has worked with parents of murdered children as well as young adults “at risk.” She honors her private workshop students, most of whom have been studying with her for many years. Joy’s work is published in over 100 literary magazines. She is a multiple Pushcart Prize & Best of The Net nominee.