Poetry
December 13-14, 2025
Tiered Tuition
$150-$400 Reserve My Spot
December 13th & 14th at 12pm-3pm (Eastern)
What a difficult beautiful pleasure it can be to make missing a practice. I miss my grandmother, my mom. I also miss the specific smell of Acadia on the day my partner and I walked there in the rain. I miss the Friendly’s sundae I used to sit and eat with my grandmother. No Friendly’s sundae will ever taste the same. I miss the first time I woke up with my partner. I already miss things that haven’t happened yet! I miss that bow tie I can’t find. I miss. I miss. My eyes are filled with tears as I write this and also I’m laughing.
What a pleasurable practice it can be to make missing a generative engine in life and in art. Like the banana peel tea that ferments and ferments and then gets poured on the roses (wow I miss the bananas and the roses) missing is another kind of compost. I’ve been stopped completely in my work by it. But now: I let it ferment and deepen and I pour it all over everything and watch things bloom.
In this class we’ll talk about missing and poetic composting and various practices to heighten our attention and sweeten the hard spots (without making them less ______).
This is a totally generative weekend of making work, talking, listening, drawing, we’ll see! Bring all your ghosts, missings, and portals. We’ll make a good missing tea to pour on the beds of your practice as the winter comes.
This class is open to EVERYONE. Let’s have fun. Let’s Miss and Wish and Grow.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi 
is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer's Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi's poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn't Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi was the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022 - 2023. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. Their new collection of poetry, The New Economy, will be released from Copper Canyon in October, 2025.
