Poetry Workshops

Class Title: “Excavating and Writing the Poetry of Fatherhood”

Dates: April 30-May 25th

Instructor: Tania Pryputniewicz

Cost: $100 (discounted from $125)

Refund policy for all classes: We will happily refund the total cost of your class, minus a $10 administrative fee, up to the day before the class start date.

You can pay in two ways. Either email Tania at tania [at] catalystbookpress.com to send a personal check or pay by paypal.

Description: You’ve watched the wife’s body transform before your eyes, witnessed first-hand her incremental emotional, psychological and spiritual migration to places you may or may not be able, though willing, to follow. Your own metamorphosis, while less physically apparent, ends up no less arduous or multi-layered. Or you and your partner have gone through longer gestations: reams of applications, false leads, interviews and further scrutiny while attempting to adopt. Or you’ve chosen not to father, but find the words of your own father coursing through your mind. Join this on-line poetry class for a chance to mine poetry of the past as well as contemporary poems (including those we’ve published at The Fertile Source) for structural and thematic inspiration towards the writing of a new crop of poems reflecting the continuum of experiences that comprise fatherhood.

Class Title: “To the Cradle and Beyond: Excavating and Writing the Poetry of Motherhood”

Dates: Monday, February 27 to March 23

Instructor:  Tania Pryputniewicz

Cost: $100 (discounted from $125)

Refund policy for all classes: We will happily refund the total cost of your class, minus a $10 administrative fee, up to the day before the class start date.

You can pay in two ways. Either email Tania at tania [at] catalystbookpress.com to send a personal check or pay by paypal.

 Description:

“My upstairs neighbor, mother of three, lives in a chronic extremity of demand that I witness from below as a kind of human storm. I do not think she would want to read poems that posit the singular solitary investigations of the privileged ‘I’ of lyric poetry.”
Ann Lauterbach, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience

 What kind of poems would that mother of three living “in a chronic extremity of demand” write? Whether you identify as the solitary writing mother (children fledged) listening from below, or the mother at the heart of the maelstrom of childrearing, join this on-line poetry circle for a chance to mine poetry of the past as well as contemporary poems (including those we’ve published at The Fertile Source) for structural and thematic inspiration for writing our own poems reflecting our experiences of motherhood. The confessional poets along with the honeycomb of the internet position us uniquely not only to communicate globally, but to write fearlessly about the realities of the complexities of the journey to, through, and beyond motherhood. Join us in this excavation and celebration of the layers we occupy simultaneously as  writers and mothers.

This on-line course is open to all writing mothers and all levels of writing experience. Weekly reading of poems paired with assignments for generating new poetry. Participant driven topics for poem generation encouraged; specific exercises offered for those who wish to use them. Guidelines for creating a safe and respectful comment community will be provided on enrollment.

“If, through caring for my children, I lost writing time, I gained by the expansion of vision and insight and compassion my experiences with them gave me…The writing I was able to do in those years is suffused with the energy my children radiated.” Pattiann Rogers, Degree and Circumstance (which appeared in Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition, Edited by Sharon Bryan)

  “The subject [of motherhood] has been hijacked, candy-coated and polluted by such powerhouses as Victorian culture and the post-war Fifties in America. Luckily, artists and feminists set out to rescue us from the sickly-sweet ideal that had shrink-wrapped the experience and denied the complexity of the role.” Nancy White, Bringing to Birth: Poetry of Motherhood, Fall 2009 Sow’s Ear

Related posts: So You Say You’re a Poetry Editor (on connecting with mothers and the poetry of motherhood)