SECOND CLASS ADDED! August 1, 9-1, Creative Writing Kickstart: Writing from Life

Posted on by alisonmcghee

NOTE: DEAR FRIENDS, THE FIRST CLASS FILLED IMMEDIATELY SO I’M ADDING A SECOND SECTION THE DAY AFTER, ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 1, FROM 9 AM TO 1 PM, AT 3554 BRYANT AVENUE SOUTH IN UPTOWN MINNEAPOLIS.

Date and venue have changed, but everything else remains the same. Changes below noted IN CAPS.

* * *

Greetings, friends, Minnesotans and countrypeople,

I’m offering a one-day Creative Writing Kickstart workshop on SATURDAY MORNING, AUGUST 1 in Minneapolis. The focus of the Kickstart is writing from life: where you are now, where you were, and points in between. We’ll do several brief writings, discuss some short published works (provided) and talk about various aspects of craft and process –maybe dialogue, maybe tense and point of view, maybe some other things– in terms of what makes great writing great.

The class will be intensive but fun and low-key. It’s designed for writers of all abilities, experience levels and genres. If you’re a longtime writer in need of a boost or someone who’s always had an interest in writing but never known how to sit down and get started, join us!

Limited to fifteen. I’d love to see you there. If you’re interested, please email me at alison_mcghee@hotmail.com to reserve a spot.

Date: SATURDAY, AUGUST 1
Time: 9 am-1 pm
Place: 3554 BRYANT AVENUE SOUTH, MINNEAPOLIS, MN 55408. The Community Gathering Room in Uptown Minneapolis, right on the corner of Bryant and 36th, between Bogart’s Donuts and Gigi’s Cafe. Parking both on-street and in their lot. Community Room.
Cost: $75, including hand-outs, payable via check, Paypal, or cold hard cash.
Bring: yourself, a pen and a notebook or your quiet laptop. Lots of beverages (including beer!) and tasty treats and sandwiches and salads available at Bogart’s and Gigi’s.

One-Day Class on July 31: Creative Writing Kickstart!

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Greetings, friends, Minnesotans and countrypeople,

I’m offering a one-day Creative Writing Kickstart workshop on Friday afternoon, July 31 in Minneapolis. The focus of the Kickstart is writing from life: where you are now, where you were, and points in between. We’ll do several brief writings, discuss some short published works (provided) and talk about various aspects of craft and process –maybe dialogue, maybe tense and point of view, maybe some other things– in terms of what makes great writing great.

The class will be intensive but fun and low-key. It’s designed for writers of all abilities, experience levels and genres. If you’re a longtime writer in need of a boost or someone who’s always had an interest in writing but never known how to sit down and get started, join us!

Limited to fifteen. I’d love to see you there. If you’re interested, please email me at alison_mcghee@hotmail.com to reserve a spot.

Date: Friday, July 31
Time: 12:30-4:30
Place: the Common Room (a private meeting room) at Common Roots Café, 2558 Lyndale Ave. S. (Right on the corner, opposite the CC Club: http://commonrootscafe.com/) Parking both on-street and in their lot.
Cost: $75, including hand-outs, payable via check, Paypal, or cold hard cash.
Bring: yourself, a pen and a notebook or your quiet laptop. Lots of beverages (including beer!) and tasty treats and sandwiches and salads available in the café.

Poem of the Week, by Todd Boss

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These days I spend a fair amount of time walking the beach and watching surfers. I don’t know how they do it, how they paddle out there and then hang out, waiting and watching for oncoming waves that are big enough to skim underneath, along, in front of. I don’t know they can see that wave coming and not want to duck right under it or paddle frantically back to the shore, the way I would do because big waves terrify me. The black-wetsuited surfers are maybe like the whales in this poem below, fearless without thinking about fear, because water is their home. A world without hem.

Whales Wear the Patterns of the Surface of the Water

– Todd Boss

all over their bodies whenever they rise for breath,
forever slipping in and out of sheaths of silk and sheer,
the sun’s hookless fishnets gliding over and over them,
over and over again. The surface is their coutourière,
and her daring glitz and glamour is what all the girls are
wearing this summer. How beautiful they are in their azure
negligees, their silver-spangled zigzag rags aglimmer!
Later, when the day’s bead curtains shift away and they drift
into the dreamless deep, they’ll leave their lovely lingerie
behind and find themselves unashamed between seamless
sheets of black satin—a world without hem—where nothing,
not even the moon’s thin strings of pretty under-things,
can come between their lovers and them.

For more information on Todd Boss, please click here.

My Facebook page..

Poem of the Week, by Langston Hughes

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I don’t usually like or want to match poems with whatever’s going on in this country of ours. Too neat and easy, too matchy-matchy. But this past week? Hello. I turned many poems over in my mind but none felt exactly right. Then, near midnight tonight, I stood in a crowded room in San Francisco and watched the tremendous storyteller and artist Ashley Bryan, 92 shining years of age, climb to a podium and lead us all in a recitation of the below poem. Is there anything that man hasn’t lived through? So here you go, my friends.

My People

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

—
For more information on Langston Hughes, please click here.
For more information on Ashley Bryan, please click here.
My blog.
My Facebook page.

 

Poem of the Week, by William Stafford

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Mom and Dad and me in DundasThis one goes out to my dad, who taught me how to make scrambled eggs, how to drive stick (kind of, anyway – after a few too many times of me stalling out the little red truck he got out of the cab so as not to yell anymore and told me I could figure it out on my own there in the cornfield, which I totally did), how to build a fire in the woodstove, how to ride a bike, how to love the open road and wheels beneath me, how not to suffer fools, how to read the funnies on Sunday morning, how to be loyal, how to be stoic, how to work hard, and how to tell a good story. Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers and father-types out there.

Father’s Voice
– William Stafford

“No need to get home early;
the car can see in the dark.”
He wanted me to be rich
the only way we could,
easy with what we had.

And always that was his gift,
given for me ever since,
easy gift, a wind
that keeps on blowing for flowers
or birds wherever I look.

World, I am your slow guest,
one of the common things
that move in the sun and have
close, reliable friends
in the earth, in the air, in the rock.

 

For more information on William Stafford, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Patricia Fargnoli

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On December 4, 2010, I sent out the Patricia Fargnoli poem below. One of my writer friends, K, wrote back that it knocked her socks off. I wrote back that I agreed, and that in my ongoing efforts to become one with winter I had memorized it. I also wrote that I missed K and maybe we should collaborate on a book together.

K: A book together! My heart sings! Can it have a fox in it?
Me: I do believe we should have a fox in our book! A small orange flame streaking his way through the snow.
K: Maybe this poem should be the epigraph to our book!
Me: Yeah!

That was four and a half years ago, and we have been working on our novel –Maybe a Fox– all this time. At one point, about six months ago, K and I happened to be in the same city at the same time and we went out for drinks and dinner.

K, after one hefty margarita: You know what? This book nearly killed me.
Me, after the same hefty margarita: That makes two of us, sister.
K: If our friendship can survive the monumental struggle of writing this book together, it can survive anything.
Me: Agreed! A toast to us!

Then we ordered another round and toasted the fact that we both still love this poem, we both still love our monumental effort of a book, and we both still love each other. No small feats, any of  them.

Should the Fox Come Again to My Cabin in the Snow
– Patricia Fargnoli

Then, the winter will have fallen all in white
and the hill will be rising to the north,
the night also rising and leaving,
dawn light just coming in, the fire out.

Down the hill running will come that flame
among the dancing skeletons of the ash trees.
I will leave the door open for him.

 

For more information on Patricia Fargnoli, please click here.

 

Poem of the Week, by Jehanne Dubrow

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When I was a kid I used to make my own clothes: skirts and pants and shirts and prom dresses. I was/am not a perfectionist and didn’t care about things like cutting straight and matching stripes to stripes and thread color to fabric color (which explains why my elephant bell green and pink striped pants looked the way they did). What I loved instead of perfection was going to thrift stores and spending pennies on old dresses and shirts and cutting them up and turning them into new shirts and skirts and quilts. Making something new out of something old. I still love doing this. One of the quilts on my bed right now contains parts of a dress my grandmother used to wear, parts of an old tablecloth, and embroidered scraps from a skirt I wore to shreds in college. Making a quilt and writing a book feel the same to me. Bits and pieces of old clothes, flickers of images and ideas, put them all together over a long time and one day you wake up and you’ve made a whole new something-out-of-nothing.

Garment Industry
– Jehanne Dubrow

Q: What’s the difference between a tailor and a poet?
        A: One generation.
                                        —Yiddish joke

My mother lifts a seam ripper, its miniature
hook made for a world of tiny violence.

Not only for ripping seams, she says.

There is a thread between us: we work at a
humming machine.

We are shirtwaist and sonnet.

She splits body from sleeve, neck from yoke.

I sift through rag paper, write down the
sound of tearing fabric.

Look. Look at the dress we sew from the shreds
of other things.

 

For more information about Jehanne Dubrow, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Mark Kraushaar

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A friend of mine had a husband –lost to cancer now– who saw no reason to stint on the bubbly. Any occasion, he’d pop the cork and fill the flutes. My daughters and I were in the kitchen enjoying a glass of wine the other night, and I was telling them about this guy, and right away we decided to go out to dinner, because we could, so we should. Right? Then I decided that from here on out there’ll be a celebration every day. Go for a run, celebrate! Make a loaf of bread, celebrate! Teach a class, celebrate! Call a friend, celebrate! Wake up still alive? Hell yes.

What If the Hokey Pokey Really Is What It’s All About?
– Mark Kraushaar

You put your right foot in,
            You put your right foot out … ,
            That’s what it’s all about.

            —The Hokey Pokey, Larry LaPrise, 1948

Of an evening filled with wide-set
bright stars I think of my friends, Ray, Sara,
Father Hay, and Phil and Joe.
I think of them together and I think of them alone:
Friends, what better than to put your right foot in,
and what better than to take it out again?

What better than to leave your jacket
and your drink and join
the circled strangers on the floor?
What better than to put your left foot in
and then to take it out since
who’ll explain this strange life anyway,
the problems with love, the trouble with money?
It must be what is meant, this must be what’s intended.
What better than to leave your silent trying behind
and put your right foot in once more
then shake it all about?
What better than having said too little
or too much you join the farmer with his wife
and daughter, the couple with their
squeaky walkers, the FedEx man,
the florist and the LPN?
It must be what is meant,
this must be what it’s all about:
what better than to join the high-heeled,
high-haired waitress first pausing and laughing,
then leaning to her friend the grinning busboy
who, putting his elbow in then out again,
now shakes it all about.

 

For more information on Mark Kraushaar, please click here.

My Facebook page.

Poem of the Week, by Brian Turner

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Been sitting here for hours trying to choose the right poem. First I chose a classic one by Wilfred Owens, in WWI, but it was unbearable. Then I chose a lesser-known one by Archibald MacLeish, mid-20th century, but that one was also unbearable. Now I’ve been reading through Brian Turner’s Iraq war poems, and they too are unbearable. Because war is unbearable. So here we are.

Here, Bullet
– Brian Turner

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

 

–​For more information on Brian Turner, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240650

Poem of the Week, by Osip Mandelstam

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This one goes out to all those for whom tomorrow, for any one of many private and public reasons, is a hard or frustrating or painful day.

The Necklace
– Osip Mandelstam (1920, translated from the Russian by Christian Wiman)

Take, from my palms, for joy, for ease,
A little honey, a little sun,
That we may obey Persephone’s bees.

You can’t untie a boat unmoored.
Fur-shod shadows can’t be heard,
Nor terror, in this life, mastered.

Love, what’s left for us, and of us, is this
Living remnant, loving revenant, brief kiss
Like a bee flying completed dying hiveless

To find in the forest’s heart a home,
Night’s never-ending hum,
Thriving on meadowsweet, mint, and time.

Take, for all that is good, for all that is gone,
That it may lie rough and real against your collarbone,
This string of bees, that once turned honey into sun.



—​For more information on Osip Mandelstam, please click here: ​http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/osip-mandelstam