The Virginia G. Piper
Center for Creative Writing

Your story is almost done. It just needs... something? The spaces between idea, draft, and done can be dark corners filled with uncertainty. Is the character's story worthy? How do you finish it without turning it into an 8,000-page omnibus? How do you know if it is good enough? These are the questions we all have from the first keystroke. This class will push you toward the answers.

Walter Benjamin once said, “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.” In this advanced three-week class, we’ll discover what is gained when we forego conventional expectations of content and form. Working in such mediums as personal essay, lyric essay, memoir, fiction, poetry, philosophy, mixed-media film, photography, song lyric, journal, dream, and anecdote, we’ll unearth our private obsessions and render our experiences accessible and relevant to a larger audience.

Join New York poet, educator, and editor, t’ai freedom ford for a three-hour workshop hosted by the Piper Writers Studio. By definition, archeology is the study of human history through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains. By definition, poetry is a similar pursuit: poets excavate sites (and sights), unearth and examine artifacts in an attempt to understand humanity. In this way, we will consider memories, familial & emotional wounds, and personal geographies as artifact in order to get at a specific moment in time.

Powerful magic resides in language but what if we invoke that power further by adopting fantastical aspects into our own writing? In this three-hour workshop we will discuss Lucie Brock-Broido, Alice Notely and Marosa di Georgio, poets whose work occupy spaces of dread, astonishment—and magic. We will explore their use of symbols in haunted landscapes, their gestures to the unseen and discuss how by incorporating the supernatural, we might bypass the self, and tap into a vaster, more ancient consciousness.

Nuestros días están colmados de información. Canales noticiosos repitiendo frases producidas desde el poder 24 horas al día, políticos atacando grupos minoritarios, crisis manufacturadas, comunidades desbordadas en las calles, en poemas, canciones y redes sociales. Estos días son para capturarse, para explicarse y complicarse. En este curso exploraremos herramientas literarias para expresar el momento político y social en el que vivimos. El objetivo final será que cada participante produzca un texto que en su opinión ayude a otros a reflexionar en la coyuntura social de nuestros días.