My teaching departs from the premise that your own experience—whether you’ve been writing for decades or are coming to the page for the first time—is a legitimate, worthwhile place to begin.
I have led creative writing workshops in many places, including Boston University, the UNIT/PITT Society for Art and Critical Awareness, Enabling Arts, and the Vancouver Public Library.
I am able to facilitate in both English and French.
SELECTED WORKSHOPS
Write Where You Are
A person “must have money and a room of her own if she is to write,” Virginia Woolf famously claimed nearly a century ago. Today, the advice has shifted: countless books and blogs promise that elaborate time-management strategies will help readers gain control over their schedules and begin to flourish creatively.
But what if you’ll never have a room of your own, or complete control over your time? What if it were possible to write where, and as, you are?
Through a series of guided readings and prompts, participants will explore the pressures and challenges currently affecting their writing routine, and the ways these pressures and challenges might actually hold creative power.
Write Like a River
Like rivers, poems love to move. They curve, drift, and change directions; they rush into cascading images and eddy into pools of quiet contemplation.
In this 90-minute workshop, participants will experiment with a series of guided readings and prompts designed to unlock poetry’s watery, sinuous, and playful impulses.
The Sound of Silence
In the words of Miles Davis, music is about the notes you don’t play. This is true of writing as well. The white space around a paragraph, the period at the end of a sentence—these can speak as loudly as the words themselves.
In this 90-minute workshop, we will move through a series of guided readings and prompts with a view to harnessing the sound of silence and composing writing that sings.