Activities / Programs / Workshops

Poetic Transformations: Revising as Re-Seeing

This workshop will build a new toolkit for revising poetry—one that valorizes artistic possibility over the idea of a single finished draft.

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Description

Eight Mondays, Mar 9-Apr 27, 5:45-7:45pm
Open to practicing poets of all levels
Limited to 12 participants
Hybrid Workshop*

Most poets move through a process of honing our work. We draft, workshop, revise, and polish our poems. But what possibilities await if we reframe revision as transformation?

This workshop will build a new toolkit for revising poetry—one that valorizes artistic possibility over the idea of a single finished draft. Together, we will embrace each poem’s power to contain and reveal multiple versions of itself—versions that can stand alone or in conversation.

Through generative exercises, craft wisdom, and workshop-style feedback, we will inhabit poet and composition scholar Wendy Bishop’s idea of radical revision. Each week, we will enact experiments on our work to shake us out of the poems we thought we knew and into new stylistic territory. By embracing revision as an act of re-seeing, we will confound our own expectations, deepen into the inherent promise of our work, and slough off stale writerly habits. A delightful, productive defamiliarization may result.

If you’ve ever felt stuck, not known how to revise, or felt too attached to a draft to change it, this workshop is for you. If you’ve ever wanted to create an inventive sequence of poems stemming from a single impulse, this workshop is for you. If you’ve ever wanted to turn your linguistic sandcastle into a lexical dragon or syllabic shore bird, this workshop is for you.

The strategies you will learn are designed to serve you both within and beyond the workshop. You can expect to leave the workshop with a newly articulated, personalized philosophy of revision. You might leave with 8 radically different versions of a single poem. You might leave with a whole new sequence of poems that could scaffold a collection. Regardless, you will leave with some substantially revised poetry along with the concrete tools and feedback to make future revision a process of expansive growth.

The workshop is open to practicing poets of all levels — with the following caveats:
1) you must already be writing and revising poems;
2) you must be willing to abandon the idea of single finished version of any given poem; and
3) you must bring 3 to 5 of your own poems that you are willing to revise beyond recognition.

*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 Riley at riley@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.

Workshop leader

Credit: Morgan Petroski

Sarah Wolfson is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which was awarded the 2020 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her poems appear in journals such as The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, Geist, Arc TriQuarterly, CV2, and The Yale Review. She is also an award-winning educator and teaching artist who has worked in a variety of contexts with poets of all experience levels. Originally from Vermont, she is a longtime resident of Montreal, where she teaches poetry and creative writing at McGill University. She is an obsessive reviser of her work.

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Register

Please note that workshop registration is on a “first come, first served” basis.

Payment is required to confirm your place in the workshop. 

Payments are to be made online via credit card or PayPal. Click on the link below to add the workshop to your shopping cart, then proceed to payment. QWF Members must be logged in to receive their discount. If you are not already a QWF member, you will have the option of purchasing a Membership, in which case you will receive the discounted workshop rate.

If you are unable to pay online, you can temporarily reserve a place by registering online. Your payment must be made to the QWF office by cheque or cash within 7 days of registration or it will automatically be cancelled. Cheques must be written out to “QWF–Quebec Writers’ Federation” or “Quebec Writers’ Federation”

If the workshop is full, you will have the option of joining the waiting list. If a space becomes available, all those on the waiting list will be notified at once by email. The available spot will be assigned on a first come, first served basis.

Please familiarize yourself with the rest of the Workshop Policies in the shaded box.

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General $200
Student $120
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Non-Member

$240
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Workshop Policies

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Special Thanks

QWF gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of Canada.