Thoughts from participants of our live workshops in New York City:
“It's truly difficult to put into words how powerful a force this workshop was. It taught me new things about myself and my writing, as well as poetry, community, and its potential.”
“Wow! The workshop was so rich and nurturing and safe — honoring the whole of our experiences and encouraging growth.”
“It feels like I grew, like something shifted inside of me. My heart feels so open.”
“This workshop was lovely and quite transformative. I am so grateful for this opportunity. I am grateful to have people explore my work who is gentle, but also critical. It was inspiring to be in a space that had no standards for normal and held space for diversity.”
Thoughts from participants of our one-week long Flash Workshops:
"[Dissolved in Water] was an amazing experience. I have taken other online workshops that were longer and didn't have a particular theme, but didn't produce as much as I did in this one week. The structure here was just right and got me out of a rut and writing. What surprised me was the quality of the writing that I was able to produce based on a combination of things like reading everyone's work, the syllabus and lessons. A week later, I'm still digesting everything and blown away. I'm walking away from this experience with a lot of gems. "
"For me, the workshop was incredibly transformative. Being with a group of people from diaspora, reading the differing perspectives in their work made me feel so much less alone. This is the first workshop I've attended with other writers of color. I found the syllabus and the guest lectures to be extremely rich. I noticed new forms that other poets were using that I want to try out. I have so much to process after this week."
"Sing That Like Dovesong was one of the greatest writing experiences of my life. It gave me great joy to be an artist and writer, and to be in wonderful company with many people who believe in the construction and power of language to address and disturb. "
"I had a really positive, affirming, and awesome experience with the Winter Tangerine workshop! It really motivated me to push myself in my writing and the prompts and readings were excellent!"
"I loved this workshop! I really felt completely in awe of the talent, support and pure brilliance of everyone. I absorbed so much information and wrote my ass off. I was absolutely floored by how resonant the prompts and assignments were. The syllabus was amazing! It was certainly overwhelming but not in a bad way. More like challenging and I feel like that helped me feel fully immersed and engaged. It was rigorous in a wonderful way. "
Thoughts from participants of our Summer Workshops:
"The summer workshop reconnected me with writing and reading poetry in a way I haven't felt in over six months. At a most basic level it gave me a reason to write, which is exactly what I needed at this time in my life. I also discovered SO MANY brilliant new poets, especially writers of colour, whose books I now intend to buy. I come away from the workshop feeling energised, inspired, humbled, powerful and more 'me' than I've felt in a long time. "
"My participation in this workshop has, honestly, changed my life. In the beginning, I was worried that my expectations for the workshop were too high, that I wanted to “catalyze a self-revolution” so badly that I wouldn’t be able to grow authentically, that my writer self was in too deep of a ditch to write my way out. At the start of the summer, I’d been feeling kind of down on myself, as a person and as a writer (and specifically, I started to feel distanced from writing about my heritage, as in it felt like it was becoming more and more difficult). However, Winter Tangerine—the syllabus and required reading, the exercises, the group critiques, the sharing of material, all of it—turned out to be everything I’d dreamed of. My participation in this workshop has not only filled me with confidence, inspiration, and a sense of purpose, but it has also helped renew my love of writing. I am so proud of everything I’ve written over the course of the three intense weeks. Writing and reading with my group members and workshop leader has been such a privilege— and it has reminded me that what I love so much about the work (that is, the work that we do as writers, and as people; as queer women/women of color/queer women of color) is the ways in which it connects us to each other. Reading the work of my peers has been so, so meaningful to me, and reading the ways in which they all reacted to my work has been invaluable. It has meant the world to me."
"I think wow. I've never seen such a comprehensive syllabus, never read such diverse bodies of work, never forced myself to confront some of the questions posed in the prompts. I think a lot of the success of the coursework is the depth and breadth--depth in the sense that we engage in complexity and in the abstract. For example, the very first prompt comes to mind immediately--write about a character that walks in the penumbra. That image itself has opened up a whole different way of thinking for me, and also introduced life to my work."
"It was amazing. To be able to interact with so many talented individuals regardless of whether it was through a digital screen was one of the highlights of my summer. Readings works that examined the race, gender, sexuality, etc. from marginalized voices was so so beautiful. I loved creating constantly and being able to share it was others. It was like saying daily: I did this, I’m alive, and I did this — it might suck incredibly, but I still did it and that is enough. The workshop pushed me to delve into writing that was visceral, vitriolic, nonsensical...all that fun stuff."
Annnnnd some more thoughts from past participants:
"The workshop opened up new ways of thinking about my process and manipulating language. I love that inclusivity and explorations of identity remained consistent throughout all parts of the workshop."
"This was the most innovative and unique workshop that I've ever been involved with--in the best way possible. The prompts (for the petit lessons, word wars, and autowrites) were challenging, but open wide enough for the results to be entirely different from writer to writer. The readings chosen were great--there was a wonderful range of writers I knew and those I was previously unaware of--they all felt fresh and were thoroughly engaging; I always knew I was learning something about craft and content as I was reading. I was astounded by the quality of this workshop, the dedication of the people running it and the advisers, the work produced by everyone, and, to me at least, this felt like a very supportive environment. I'm so happy that I got to do this workshop."
"THIS SHIT WAS LIT."
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art is "Perfect Fit" by Su Wan Kim.