Multigenre
January 23-27, 2017
Open to All
Tiered Tuition
Reserve My Spot This offering is not currently available for registration. Please check back or email Jennifer Jean at jjean@fawc.org for any questions.
About the Offering
We are writers, but not just writers. We bring different areas of expertise to the table—whether a profession, another creative passion, travel, or the experience of parenting a sick child. Have you ever had someone say “You should write about that,” and not known where to begin? This one-week intensive course unlocks that material.
We’ll begin with a one-on-one email consultation that identifies your core area of outside expertise; we’ll identify any concerns and troubleshoot. Each day’s work includes a generative exercise designed to move you from prosaic understanding to poetic phrasing. You can opt to work in the mode of poetry or flash nonfiction. We’ll focus on building a vocabulary for the reader, conceiving figurative language, and using form to enact content. We will read inspiring work from poets and memoirists who deploy their outside realms of knowledge on the page. You can create new drafts, or revise old ones, depending on what works best for you. Our culminating exchange will include editorial feedback on two to three poems or up to 1,800 words of nonfiction, and the option of a phone or video / Skype conference.
About the Instructor/Moderator
Sandra Beasley’s newest book is Made to Explode, which won the 2022 Housatonic Book Award for poetry. Her disability memoir, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a cultural history of food allergy, received wide media coverage and was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award in 2011. She has published three other poetry collections (including winners of the Barnard Women Poets Prize and the New Issues Poetry Prize) and edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Newspapers and magazines that have featured her work include the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, The Nation, and more.
Honors for Beasley’s work include a 2015 NEA Artist Fellowship and six DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowships. She has held visiting writer professorships at Davidson College, University College Cork, American University, Wichita State University, Cornell College, Lenoir-Rhyne University, and the University of Mississippi. Beasley has also taught with low-residency MFA programs at Hood College, the University of Nebraska Omaha, and the University of Tampa. Beasley is the poetry editor for Blair, a literary press based in Durham, North Carolina, and Gravy, the quarterly journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Southwest Washington, DC.
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