Craft-based lessons for transforming trauma into poetry.
Inspired by Jehanne Dubrow’s craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma, this workshop will provide both new and experienced poets with practical strategies for representing and exploring pain on the page. Each week, we’ll discuss best practices for writing about trauma, study poems that can serve as role models for our work, and draft new pieces based on generative writing prompts, looking at approaches such as list-making, surrealism, and nonlinear storytelling. By the end of the workshop, participants will have written at least three poems inspired by different craft-based techniques and will have a range of additional strategies to take with them.
Live video conference: This workshop will be held via our online video conferencing platform, Zoom. You can view brief tutorials on using the platform here. On the start date or the day before, participants will receive an email with login info (please check your spam if you don’t see it).
In this workshop you’ll learn:
- Form & Content
- Image-making
- Use of sensory details
- Lyric & Narrative
Time requirements
- Almost no advance preparation will be necessary. For most of the sessions, we will read “role-model poems” in class, and work on the writing prompts in class as well. On the final class days (and depending on the number of people who register), we will workshop revisions of poems that each person has written during the course of the class.
Materials
- All reading materials will be provided (although participants are encouraged to buy The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma).
Who should take this workshop?
- This workshop is for both new and experienced poets who are interesting in learning how to write compelling, artful poems that engage with trauma.
If you need an accommodation for this workshop, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.