Ecopoetics: pathways for participation
Saturday, July 19, 2025. 2-4pm EST, on Zoom.
facilitated by Calleja Smiley Welsh
“Ecopoetics” can be thought of as a creative practice that tunes our perception to the more-than-human world. However, we find the usual wielding of language awkward here, since the world outside is not governed by our habitual patterns of syntax. Although this may feel like an impasse, I think the poem-mind can also open up relationships with other beings in our environment through material resonances.
In this workshop, we will re-imagine ecopoetry as a mode of participation that can both obstruct and admit dynamic relationships with all that exists around us. Firstly, we will read and discuss some excerpts from poets such as Brenda Hillman, Franny Choi, Alice Oswald, and Forrest Gander. We’ll then take to our own local environments (inside or outside) for a brief, guided period of exploration and note-taking. Finally, we’ll experiment with some prompts to draft poems and share our work with the group.
Calleja Smiley Welsh grew up in Michigan, and has since lived in many regions across the US. She is currently completing her MFA in Poetry at Columbia, where she was awarded the Richard Howard Memorial Prize in Poetry and taught undergraduate essay writing. Calleja recently finished writing her debut poetry collection, Fire Regime, and has poems published in No, Dear Magazine and Tupelo Press’ anthology, The Last Milkweed. As a former dancer, she has performed with the Merce Cunningham Trust, Gibney’s Community Actionists, and Garrett + Moulton Productions, among others. Calleja currently lives in Manhattan with her husband and houseplants.
Opening New Doors: a generative workshop on the poetic turn
Tuesday, June 24, 2025. 7-8:30pm EST, on Zoom.
facilitated by Cat Wei
How do you create turns in a poem to surprise the reader? How do you make room for surprise for yourself as a writer? In this generative workshop we will read poems by Sharon Olds, Omotara James, Matthew Olzmann, Ellen Bass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Eugenia Leigh, and others who have mastered the art of the poetic turn as a vehicle for poetic transformation. We’ll also discuss techniques for accessing curiosity and newness in your own work and use prompts to explore new entryways into how to speak what’s within you into language.
Cat Wei is a poet and writer in New York. Her work is Best of the Net nominated and appears in The Slowdown, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, No Dear, Muzzle and others. A Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award recipient, a Tin House alumn, and an Idyllwild Writers Week Fellow, she is semifinalist for Tupelo Press' Dorset Prize, a finalist for the Disquiet Literary Contest, the Pleiades' Prufer Poetry Prize, and the Poetry Project's Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship. She has received support from the Edith Wharton Writers-in-Residence Program, Vermont Studio Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Sundress Academy for the Arts.
The Magical Realist
Saturday, May 24, 2025. 4-6pm EST, on Zoom.
facilitated by Karl Michael Iglesias
In this generative writing workshop, we’ll explore the world of magical realism, embracing a spirit of poetic play and the bending of reality. We’ll read poems by Aracelis Girmay and Jon Sands, whose work, while grounded in realism, boldly engages with the unreal, the impossible, and the supernatural. Our focus will be on cultivating a “magical consciousness”—the awareness that, as writers, we have the power to actively shape the impossible within our narratives. We will explore themes like transformation, resurrection, and the supernatural, all in the pursuit of deeper truths. Through play, we’ll examine how they can create tension, ignite surprise, and even spark humor. How can this imaginative play bring us closer to the truths in our work?
Karl Michael Iglesias is a Puerto Rican actor, director and writer from Milwaukee, WI, who now resides in Brooklyn, NY. His poetry can be read in the Florida Review, RHINO, the Brooklyn Review, the Madison Review, the Hong Kong Review, the Chicago Reader and the Academy of American Poets - POEM-A-Day, to name a few. Karl is the author of the poetry chapbooks CATCH A GLOW and THE BOUNCE—both available on Finishing Line Press. Dreaming toward Transformation: A Generative Workshop on the Power of Dreams and the Subconscious
Dreaming Toward Transformation
Sunday, September 8, 2024. 4:00-5:30 pm EST, on Zoom.
facilitated by Stephanie Niu
What can a dream do? In a space unbounded by the logic of the waking world, how might dreams push us to imagine reality differently and even transform it? In this 90-minute generative workshop, we will dive into the imagery and language of dreams, prompted by selected work from Dana Levin and Brendan Constantine, and discuss the role of dreams in transforming and reimagining the world with all its beauty and violences. Participants will collectively brainstorm a list of transformative techniques to use in their own writing, respond to generative prompts, and emerge with a deeper consideration of the dream’s sister question: what can a poem do?
Stephanie Niu is a poet and writer from Marietta, Georgia. Her poem "Exploding Whale Day" appeared in No, Dear Issue 28 (Water). Her first full-length poetry collection, I Would Define the Sun, won the inaugural Vanderbilt University Literary Prize and is forthcoming in February 2025. She is the author of the chapbooks Survived By (Host Publications, 2024), and She Has Dreamt Again of Water (Diode Editions, 2022). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Literary Hub, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship for research on Christmas Island’s labor history, through which she led youth poetry workshops and published the zine Our Island, Our Future. She lives in Brooklyn.