Expanding Our Poetic Range Through Memory, Place, and the Senses

Eight Thursdays, 5:45–7:45 p.m.
Open to all
Limited to 12 participants
Hybrid workshop*

How, as writers, can we break the surface of the everyday and go deep? This workshop is for poets of any level of experience who are seeking to expand the range of their subject matter. Over the eight sessions of the workshop, we will take some time to dwell in the places our writers’ sensibility can travel when we tune into our senses and journey into memory and place.

The aim of the workshop will be to generate a rich pool of new material, from which our best work can emerge. Workshops will consist of in-class writing exercises, weekly writing assignments, and time for participating poets to receive constructive feedback from the workshop leader and their peers. As a group, we will also perform close readings of works by a range of published writers that constellate around a series of themes selected to help us mine our own memories and sensory experiences of the world around us. Some proposed themes include: a child’s-eye view: writing through the lens of childhood; lost and found: orienting through poetry; (re)mapping our world: a sense of place; entering the myth: poetic exchanges with mythology; and mapping the landscape of the body.

You will be encouraged, for the duration of the course, to “apprentice” yourself to the work of a published poet of your choice, whose voice will be a steady and nourishing guide as you work on your own material. You will also have the opportunity (though it is by no means obligatory) to read your own work aloud, both as a practice tool for giving future poetry readings, and to “lend an ear” to the editing process. The workshop will be a safe and friendly space, with an emphasis on diving into the messiness of creation and getting excited about new ideas.

*This workshop will take place at the QWF Office (Room 3, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Westmount, Quebec) with up to 2 virtual spots for participants who are unable to attend in-person because of distance or disability. By default, all workshop registrations are for in-person spots. If you would like to request a virtual slot, contact John at john@qwf.org stating the reason for which you would need the virtual spot, then wait for a response before registering. Please do not register until you receive confirmation of a virtual spot for you.

Kelly Norah Drukker is a Montréal-based poet and nonfiction writer. Her poetry collection Small Fires (McGill-Queen’s University Press) won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Concordia University First Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Petits feux, the French-language translation, was published by Le lézard amoureux in 2018. Most recently, Kelly’s work has appeared in The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, The Temz Review, Burning House Press (UK), and Rabbit Poetry (Australia). Kelly holds an MA in English and Creative Writing and a PhD in interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University.