As spring arrives, Literary Arts at Featherstone announces its workshops for the season. From April 5 to April 9, poet Angel Nafis will be teaching her “Elegies are Odes, Odes are Elegies, Too” workshop. “This workshop will focus on the components and potential of both the ode and the elegy. How they each bend to encompass the mundane and extraordinary elements of our earth. Participants will explore both structures in each of their traditional gestures of praise and grief — but too they will be asked to look at the possibilities of the ‘un-doable’ things and the ‘immortal’ things in their lives through the scrutinizing of the unconventional, the ordinary and the downright detestable. Relevant authors utilized in the workshop will include but are not limited to Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Toi Derricotte, Shira Erlichman, Ross Gay, and Aracelis Girmay,” Nafis says in a press release.
On Tuesday evenings from April 13 through May 11, Noepe Center for Literary Arts founder, Justen Ahren, will teach his Devotion to Writing: Cultivate a Daily Writing Practice workshop. “This six-week workshop will help you release the writing within you, develop your imaginative skills, and learn how to sustain yourself as a creative writer,” Ahren says in the release. “Each week we will explore how rituals, gratitude, surrender, even doubt and play, can aid our practice and enable us to express more deeply and more freely than ever before.”
K-Ming Chang will lead her Writing Family Stories workshop from May 17 to May 21. “This workshop will explore the process of writing family narratives, whether fiction or nonfiction, examining the ‘family’ (which can be defined many ways) as a framework for survival, history, agency, and reclamation,” Chang says in the press release. “This is a generative class for those who want to carve out time to write and experiment. Through prompts and exercises, we will explore how family stories can function as microcosms of collective histories, as the fabric of folklore, myths, and oral stories, and as spaces for personal and collective exploration. We will rewrite or interact with family narratives to create spaces of subversion, resistance, and storytelling that expand beyond the self. Participants will generate short pieces of new writing in any genre, and they will leave the workshop with innovative strategies to approach stories about family (of all definitions).”
All of the workshops will take place via Zoom and are open to writers from anywhere and at any level. They are limited to 12 participants. Find out more information and register at bit.ly/3qqx7gD.
