Workshops
Join Stuart Kestenbaum in an online writing workshop for creators eager to explore their artistic journey through writing, gaining valuable insights into their craft while refining their expressive abilities.
Dates:
Sep 28, 2024 - Sep 29, 2024
Levels:
All
Workshop Fee: $325
Workshop Duration: 8 hours over a weekend (Saturday & Sunday, 9am-1pm ET)
Workshop Location: Online
Class Size: 12
Note: This workshop will be held in a live, online format utilizing the Zoom platform.
Class meets Saturday & Sunday, Sep 28-29 from 9am-1pm ET.
We don’t write what we think; we learn what we are thinking through the act of writing. This workshop is intended for makers of all kinds who want both to write about their work and to gain a greater understanding of their creative process through writing. We’ll write from images, memory, and observation. In class activities will include short and long writing exercises, looking at examples of other writers, and discussing each other’s work. There will also be one longer at home writing activity in between the two sessions.
We’ll start without judging and follow the work where it needs to go. In his essay The Figure a Poem Makes, Robert Frost writes “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” This workshop will provide opportunities for us to surprise ourselves, in Frost’s words, by “remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” Participants will leave with new strategies for generating written or visual work.
Images copyright Dave Bell.
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Instructor: Stuart Kestenbaum
Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions 2021), and a collection of essays The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press). He was the host of the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here and the host/curator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future. He was the director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts from 1988 until 2015. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he has designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts. Stuart Kestenbaum has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in numerous small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, the Sun, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the New York Times Magazine, and on the Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021.