Discover New Entry Points into Your Writing: An Open Genre Workshop with National Book Award Finalist Reginald Gibbons

Thursdays, July 18, 25, & Aug 1, 6:30-8:30pm CST, on Zoom (This class was rescheduled from Thur, July 11, 18 & 25)
Instructor: Reginald Gibbons
Nonmember: $140; Member: $120; Student/Educator/Mil $75

*EARN CPE’S

SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE. 

Class Full. To add your name to the waitlist, please email Josh Cantú at joshua@geminiink.org.

Are you struggling to begin a creative piece or has the revision process left you lost on how to move forward? Paying attention to our inner and outer worlds and connecting the two using our intuition as a guide can help us work through creative blocks. Using techniques based on the work of author and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, we will tune into objects in the outside world to help us dig into deeper parts of ourselves, so we can get unstuck and add depth to our writing.

In this three-part, open-genre workshop, we will learn how to use not only writerly craft from a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction but also our landscape of feeling and thought, memory and experience to create a more deliberate artistic practice. We will examine the works of writers such as Amy Hempel, Basil Bunting, Patricia Smith, Marga Minko, Kimiko Hahn, and others. Students will pick which writers resonate most for them and study how intuition and craft informs their work.

In the workshop, everyone will draft new work as well as revise existing pieces, using a process that brings together intuition and craft in unique ways. Participants will be able to carry this innovative practice into all their work.

This class is open to writers of all genres and skill levels.

Students will leave this class with:

• An understanding of the connection between intuition and craft
• Techniques for working through creative blocks
• A draft of new or revised creative work

Reginald Gibbons, Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, is a poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic. His books of poems include Last Lake (University of Chicago Press), Creatures of a Day (LSU Press; Finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; see https://www.ronslate.com/on-creatures-of-a-day-poems-by-reginald-gibbons-lsu-press/), and Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories (University of Chicago Press). Three bilingual selections of his poems have been published: in  Spanish and English, Desde una barca de papel (translated by Manuel Ulacia, Victor Manuel Mendiola, Jennifer Clement, and Jordi Doce, and edited by Jorde Doce, 2010, Littera Libros [Spain]); in Italian and English, L’Abitino Blu (translated by Piera Mattei, 2012, gattomerlino/superstripes); and in French and English, Je Pas Je (translated by Nathanael, 2014, e-book, recoursaupoeme.com).