Classes
Upcoming
The Magic of Collaborative Poetry
What happens when we “animate [our] privacy with another person’s magic”?* In this three-hour generative class, we’ll experience the joy, play, and intimacy of collaborative writing and consider what is gained when we embrace interdependence over the sanctity of individual authorship. We’ll explore collaborative methods, write collaborative poems, share our writing, and read poetry and process notes by duos such as Seth Landman and Lewis Freedman, Raul Ruiz and Jennifer S. Cheng, imogen xtian smith and alma valdez-garcia, and Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan. While the primary goal of this class is to explore the pleasures and possibilities of writing with others, writing collaboratively also enriches our solo practice, instilling in us a kind of fearlessness that liberates us to experiment and take risks.
*Jane Miller, on her collaboration with Olga Broumas
Saturday, September 20, 11 - 2 PST (2 - 5 EST)
Remote, hosted by Poets House
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Writing Collaborative Poems All Day and Forever
Winslow House, Vallejo, CA, June 2025
Writing collaboratively is a way to play with language, to volley words back and forth, thwack, thwack, read the results and laugh like you’re at a slumber party and then do it again. To liberate yourself from the loneliness and ego of individual authorship and enjoy the intimacy and surprise of letting someone else finish your sentence or stanza. We’ll start by reading some collaboratively written poems (and accompanying process notes) and considering a variety of methods of collaboration. Then we’ll spend the day experimenting with these methods, as a large group and in smaller groups and pairs, taking breaks to read some of our brand-new collaborative poems. At the end of the day, I’ll suggest some asynchronous and virtual methods you can use to continue and expand your lifelong collaborative practice. This workshop is for anyone who likes writing and is curious about collaboration. No collaboration experience necessary, no poetry experience necessary.
Past
What Does Writing Teach Us About Writing?
Winslow House, Vallejo, CA, June 2024
When we write, we accumulate words, sentences, and pages, but we also accumulate knowledge. I believe that whenever we’re writing, we’re teaching ourselves how to write — and whenever we share our writing with friends, we teach each other how to write.
In this workshop, we’ll consider what our writing has taught us so far, identify obstacles we’re facing in our current projects, and experiment with prompts, constraints, and interventions that might reveal new ways to surmount these obstacles. The first part of our day will be conversations and writing experiments, and the second part of our day will be unstructured writing time. Before we part, we’ll reconvene and optionally share our writing. This workshop is for anyone who is in the middle of writing or trying to write something in any genre — in fact, the more genres, the better!
