Starting TONIGHT: Join Kate Online for an AWA Generative Writing Group! All Genres/All Levels/Donation-Based & Fundraiser

During this time of social distancing, write alone–with others! Join Kate Asche for online writing and sharing sessions. Suggested donation is $20 per week (50% off Kate’s regular workshop rate) via PayPal to asche (dot) kate (at) gmail (dot) com; for every single donation $20 and over, Kate will donate half to a reputable nonprofit of her choice supporting those in need during this crisis. You’ll do good—and write in good company!

Schedule

Kate will host this ongoing writing group while we are all sheltering in place on FRIDAY NIGHTS 6:00 pm-9:00 pm (we may finish before that, depending on group size) starting TONIGHT, March 20, 2020.

Registration

Join for any/all meetings! Space is limited. You’ll need to register to join: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/uJwrd-Gvrjgr6opOu6f_6oIEphIN-TQiNQ

How to Prepare

Kate asks that each participant read https://amherstwriters.org/philosophy/ to learn the basics of the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) method we’ll be using before joining your first session. Kate will recap at the start of each session.

How Each Session Works

As an experienced AWA facilitator, Kate will provide a short poem or piece of prose for us to enjoy together, to get our minds on our writing. Then, Kate will provide a writing prompt and facilitate quiet writing time. Next, Kate will lead off by sharing her own just-written words first, and talk through the feedback process as folks respond to her draft. Then it will be YOUR turn–if you wish! No one (except Kate) is required to share. Those who do share will hear from others only what we like, what is strong for us, and what we remember. There is NO CONSTRUCTIVE CRITIQUE in this group, as that is not part of the AWA approach. This approach is for generating (and treasuring!) brand-spanking-new work…together!

The Fine Print

Due to the donation-based nature of this program, Kate is not able to offer technical support (Zoom provides that at https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us) or answer extensive questions about the AWA Method (Kate encourages all participants to read around at https://amherstwriters.org/ and to buy the founder, Pat Schneider’s, excellent book–which contains MANY prompts!!–called Writing Alone and With Others (Oxford University Press), available here. Kate is a trained facilitator experienced in holding safe creative writing spaces for all genres through the facilitation protocols provided for in the AWA Method and other approaches. And, the unique nature of the online meeting space will be a learning experience for us all. Please remember you are joining this meeting at your own risk, and thank you in advance for your patience as Kate learns how to effectively facilitate using the available tools within Zoom. Also please note: Because these are donations, refunds will not be issued for any reason; thank you for understanding. Kate reserves the right to cancel any and all sessions for any reason and will provide email notification to all registrants if a session will be canceled.

See you online–let’s get writing!

xoxo

Kate

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Kate’s 2018-19 Poetry Workshop Reads THIS Monday at SPC @ 7:30 p.m.

Come out to SPC Monday night, May 13, to hear new work by Kate’s 2018-19 workshop members!

 

Monday, May 13, 7:30 pm

Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th St

followed by Open Mic

 

Over a period of eight months this past year, Kate Asche led a group of women poets on a journey of (re)discovery into poetry by American women published over the last century. As we reconnected with familiar inspiring voices and found ourselves also astonished by women poets tragically lost to obscurity—and grappled with the whos and the whys of these near-absences—we offered our own poems up to each other and discussed where and how our work responds to and extends American women poets’ rich creative conversation(s). Join this incredible group of writers at Sacramento Poetry Center to celebrate the challenges, discoveries and triumphs they experienced during this humbling and inspiring journey to poetry’s roots! Reading starts at 7:30 p.m., with the customary open mic to follow.

 

BARBARA BRANDES is new to poetry.  This class last year was her first foray. Watch for themes from the natural world. She is not new to writing; she and several colleagues formed a writing group ten years ago, where she has focused on family memoir. Barbara works as a psychologist in private practice.

 

SUSAN DLUGACH was a Las Vegas Daily Optic (New Mexico) reporter long ago covering such breaking news as Mickey Mouse’s train stop in town to publicize his 50th birthday. As an English teacher, she coordinated Power of the Pen, a literary contest for students at her school, because she wants everyone to love literature as much as she does.

 

KAREN DURHAM lives and writes in Sacramento. She reads spoken-word stories and poetry at Writers On the Air and has published short stories and non-fiction in American River Review. When her friends ask, “why poetry,” she says, “because it’s impossible, and I’m a contrarian.”

 

DEBORAH SHAW HICKERSON is a fifth generation Californian. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where she studied cultural anthropology. She taught social sciences for many years. Deborah began studying poetry six years ago. She hosted Winters Out Loud, a poetry open mic for four years. Her work has appeared in The Yolo Crow, the Winters Express, Moonshine Ink, and in Poetry Now. She is currently working on two chapbooks.

 

KATHY LES decades ago earned a B.A. in English, thinking herself an analytical reader but never a writer. She circled her way into writing in many forms over the course of her various careers until she found her way to poetry and fiction, where she now spends her writing days. He work has been published in Soul of the Narrator and Tule Review.

 

LAURA ROSENTHAL began to walk the poetry path before taking a detour into the practice of law for close to forty years. She has returned to her first love, and has been published in Poetry Now, Brevities, Sacramento Voices, and Tule Review. Laura attended the 2017 poetry workshop at Squaw Valley and is grateful for the many local opportunities to collaborate with, and be inspired by, other writers.

 

BETH SUTER studied Environmental Science at U.C. Davis and has worked as a naturalist and teacher. She is also a Pushcart Prize nominee with recent or forthcoming poems in Colorado Review, Natural Bridge, and CALYX, among others. She lives in Davis, California with her husband and son.

 

KATE ASCHE, M.A., is a writer, teacher, editor and literary community builder working in Sacramento. Her first poetry collection, the chapbook Our Day in the Labyrinth, was published a few years ago by Finishing Line Press

 

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The Spring 2019 Conferences/Workshops/Festivals List!

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the spring installment of my annual regional conferences and workshops list! The permanent (date-less) list lives over at my Resources page, so do bookmark that, as well as use it to mark your calendar for items to check back on, as it contains events not listed here because their 2019 information is not yet available.

I’d like especially to highlight the Sacramento Poetry Center Annual Spring Conference, for which I have the great honor of serving as the presenter coordinator for the second year now. I hope to see you there–and beyond!

Happy writing,

Kate

**

Sacramento Poetry Center Annual Spring Conference

April 6

9:00 a.m. Registration; 9:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. Conference

This year’s conference includes a fantastic lineup of poets from across Northern California! With a special lunchtime Q&A about the *new* MFA program at UC Davis, with program director Katie Peterson, **AND** a new midday reading presenting local authors, presses and magazines with new work out!

Register today at Brown Paper Tickets, and find general info soonish at sacramentopoetrycenter.org.

Sacramento Poetry Center at 1719 25th Street
Registration Fee of $40 includes access to all three sessions for talks, all readings and lunch.
Pay at the door or send check to: SPC 1719 25th Street Sacramento, CA 95816.

Here are the highlights:

**

Our Life Stories Conference

April 13

9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

The excellent long-standing cross-generational writers conference sponsored by Hart Senior Center and Cosumnes River College. Visit ourlifestories.org to view speaker bios and workshop sessions.

Cosumnes River College
8401 Center Parkway, Sacramento, CA

**

Sierra Poetry Festival

April 27

9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Nevada County Arts Council presents the Sierra Poetry Festival, which the Council describes on the website: “Sierra Poetry Festival encourages both a strong local presence and international and universal themes. Each year we choose a special anchor for these themes. For 2019 our anchor point is Breath and Shadow, breath indicating the ebb and flow of nature and the seasons, and shadow being symbolic of our ephemeral existence and self-reflection.” See the website for more info.

Cost: $25-$40, free for students with valid ID

**

WordSpring at Butte College

April 27

8:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.

WordSpring is a creative writing conference put on by a small team of teachers and students who are passionate about writing. Our conference mission is to invigorate and empower our diverse local community of new and experienced writers by creating an event where they can come together while also bringing in professionals from near and far to share their expertise. This conference is an inspiring experience that leaves attendees refreshed, excited, and ready to write.

Each year the conference features a unique and engaging contest special to that conference–check out the website for more information.

The conference includes a light breakfast and buffet lunch in registration costs. WordSpring is sponsored by the English Department at Butte College and is in part supported by donations from the community and state equity grants. For more information on registration and our sonnet-writing contest email us at wordspring@butte.edu or call Professor Molly Emmons at (530) 895-2935.

**

Gold Rush Writers Conference

May 3-5

View program information and register here.

Come join the Gold Rush Writers Conference at the historic Leger Hotel in picturesque Mokelumne Hill where writing professionals will guide you to a publishing bonanza through a series of panels, specialty talks, workshops and celebrity lectures. Go one-on-one with successful poets, novelists, biographers, memoirists and short story writers. The conference includes a picnic supper in a Victorian garden Friday evening, as well as Saturday dinner and Sunday brunch.

**

Surprise Valley Writers Conference

May 31 – June 4

2018’s program feature faculty members Greg Glazner (poetry), Judy Halebsky (poetry), Anna Marie Spagna (creative nonfiction) and Joshua Mohr (fiction)

Four days of writers’ workshops; Friday afternoon, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday mornings with ample time for lunch, craft lectures, writing and exploring. Evening events include a Welcome Reception, Staff Readings, Keynote Speech, Campfire Open Mic, shared meals and community building. We also encourage attendees to write and discover Surprise Valley on your own. Our staff is available to offer suggestions on local sights, drives and adventures.

All workshops and lectures are held in downtown Cedarville.

**

Squaw Valley Community of Writers

Two different sessions, by genre, throughout June, July and August

Portions of the program are open to the public.

The Community of Writers was established in 1969 by novelists Blair Fuller and Oakley Hall, who were both residents of the valley. It was originally staffed by a band of San Francisco writers including David Perlman, Walter Ballenger, Barnaby Conrad and John Leggett, the latter two of whom went on to found, respectively, the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. The Community of Writers continues to be directed by Brett Jones.

Over the years the community has mounted workshops in Fiction, Nonfiction, Screenwriting, Playwriting, Poetry, and Nature Writing (the Art of the Wild, co-produced by Jack Hicks and University of California at Davis), and Writing the Medical Experience directed by David Watts. Lisa Alvarez and Louis B. Jones now co-direct the Fiction Program and Michael Carlisle directs the nonfiction Program of the Writers Workshop, which were for twenty years directed by Carolyn Doty. Galway Kinnell directed the Poetry Program for 17 years and Robert Hass has directed it since 2004. Diana Fuller directs the Screenwriters Workshop, founded in 1974 by screenwriters Tom Rickman and Gill Dennis.

**

Napa Valley Writers’ Conference

July 28 – August 2

2019 Faculty:

  • In poetry – Eavan Boland, Forrest Gander, Jane Hirshfield, Major Jackson
  • In fiction – Lan Samantha Chang, Ryan Harty, Mitchell S. Jackson, Julie Orringer
  • NEW! In translation – Howard Norman

Since 1981, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference has provided an opportunity for fellowship and serious work with a focus on craft amidst the hills and vineyards that have made the region famous. The conference is a project of Napa Valley College.

**

Mendocino Coast Writers Conference

August 1-3

2019 faculty lineup is fantastic!!

Features nationally-recognized authors and publishing professionals who are outstanding teachers. The conference is limited to 100 participants who will discover: how to develop their literary craft in a supportive community, surrounded by the spectacular scenery and temperate climate of California’s North Coast; a place to exchange ideas with authors, editors, literary agents, and other writers of many talents, ages and backgrounds. Learning happens in workshops, seminars, panels, and during informal social gatherings; inspiration to explore how writing can shape the world. Whatever the genre, whether fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, words are a powerful instrument of change; a place where you can take creative risks, whether on the page or on the stage, and where you will be inspired to explore new ways to shape your writing. An opportunity for teachers to earn Continuing Education Units (CEUs) through Dominican University.

General registration opens March 1.

**

Writing By Writers Workshop @ Tomales Bay

October 17-21

201 Faculty: Carolyn Forché, Pam Houston, Rebecca Makkai, Tommy Orange, Carl Phillips, Lidia Yuknavitch

The Writing By Writers Workshop @ Tomales Bay brings aspiring writers into close community with nationally known poets and writers. Manuscript and poetry workshops are limited to 12 participants and generative workshops are limited to 15 to ensure an intimate setting.  For information on how to apply, please click here. Conference is held at at Marconi Conference Center, Marshall, California, just north of San Francisco in Marin County.

Scholarships are available and applications for these are due on May 1.

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Two December Delights: 12/1 “Into English” Workshop; 12/10 Class Reading!

Join Kate for a one-day workshop on Saturday, 12/1

Take a daylong deep dive into the art and process of poetry translation, and see how exploring translation energizes your own practice of writing—whether or not you, yourself, perform translation work. Before the class meeting, we will read selections from the exciting new book Into English, a collection of various poems in side-by-side multiple translations plus essays on the craft of poetry translation, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer.

The workshop day itself will begin with prompt-writing time to generate a fresh draft, which we’ll then play with throughout the rest of the day as we alternate between reading discussion and translation-inspired exploratory and revision exercises. Though anyone who wishes to play with translation (in the traditional sense) during the day’s writes is heartily invited to do so, Kate will focus the discussion and writing prompts on the imaginative inspirations and nuts-and-bolts craft skills that an encounter with translation makes available to us as we write in our only and/or primary language(s).

Learn more or email Kate at kate (at) kateasche (dot) com to register today!

Come out to SPC Monday night, December 10, to hear new work by Kate’s 2017-18 workshop members!

Over a period of eight months in 2017-18, Kate Asche led a group of women poets on a journey of (re)discovery into “the beginner’s mind of poetry.” As we learned, and learned anew, key craft concepts such as the line and line endings, rhythm and meter, use of negative space, organic and received forms, figures and more, we wrote two new poems each month. We spent our final three class sessions in two rounds of revision as well as in practicing the performance of our poems. On December 10, join this incredible group of writers at Sacramento Poetry Center to celebrate the challenges, discoveries and triumphs they experienced during this humbling and inspiring journey to poetry’s roots! Reading starts at 7:30 p.m., with the customary open mic to follow.

KATE ASCHE, M.A., is a writer, teacher, editor and literary community builder working in Sacramento. her first poetry collection, the chapbook Our Day in the Labyrinth, was published a few years ago by Finishing Line Press.

**

BARBARA BRANDES is new to poetry.  This class last year was her first foray. Watch for themes from the natural world. She is not new to writing; she and several colleagues formed a writing group ten years ago, where she has focused on family memoir. Barbara works as a psychologist in private practice.

**

KAREN DURHAM has only recently learned through fellow poets that the world is nothing like what she was told. She contributes spoken-word stories, essays and poetry to Writers On the Air and has had short stories and non-fiction published in American River Review and California Update.

**

BETHANIE HUMPHREYS is a writer, editor, and mixed-media visual artist. She is a Sacramento Poetry Center board member, and SPC Art Gallery curator. She was Editor in Chief of the 2015 American River Review, and is currently Associate Editor and Art Director for Tule Review. Her chapbook, Dendrochronology, will be published by Finishing Line Press in June, 2019.

**

HEATHER JUDY is a poet and artist living in Sacramento. She is a Sacramento Poetry Center board member, an associate editor for Tule Review, and co-curates for the Sacramento Poetry Center art gallery.

**

KATHY LES decades ago earned a B.A. in English from U.C. Berkeley, thinking herself an analytical reader but never a writer. She circled her way into writing in many forms over the course of her various careers until she found her way to poetry and fiction, where she now spends her writing days. He work has been published in Soul of the Narrator and Tule Review.

**

LISA LUDDEN  is the author of the chapbook Palebound, and her poem, “How is Home,” is a finalist for the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize 2018. Her poems appear in Tule Review (forthcoming), Natural Bridge, Mockingheart Review, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her first full-length book of poetry.

 

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Cirque du Poème: What a Night in Vegas Taught Me About Poetry and Attention

In this essay, I explore how experiencing another art form informs me as a writer and reader of poetry. If you like what you read here, you’ll love the interdisciplinary workshops I am offering in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum this fall. Head over to Workshops to learn more and enroll!

 

I found myself in Las Vegas in early June, at a four day annual conference for my day job (I manage international marketing for UC Davis School of Law). While I love the desert, Vegas isn’t exactly my idea of a good time—huge crowds, hot nights outside and freezing, over-air-conditioned 24/7 inside… I was a little bummed about the location, until I found out that the traditional conference field trip (they take all 600 or so of us on a field trip for one of the evenings) was going to be (drumroll)…Cirque du Soleil’s O at the Bellagio. I was thrilled! I had never seen a Cirque show and had wanted to for years.

 

The big night came, and we boarded charter bus after charter bus and they ferried us down to the Strip and into the sea of people crowding the Thursday night sidewalks. I bought myself an iced water and some peanut M&Ms and followed my associate dean and her nostalgia-inducingly fragrant popcorn into the theatre and found our seats, which turned out to be pretty much right in the center. Nice! It was shaping up to be a good evening.

 

My dean and I chatted about the show (she hadn’t seen a Cirque show before, either, and was looking forward to it) and munched our snacks and watched our watches tick down to seven o’clock. A few minutes before show time, while the final audience members still searched out there seats and quiet chatter filled the room, I saw a few people with rather loud outfits—big stripes, bright colors—moving in the aisles. It’s Vegas, I thought at first. People wear whatever here, I’m sure.

 

I continued chatting with my dean while watching the room. The men and women with the boldly-patterned outfits now had objects in their hands…flowers…a shiny metal ball…and I realized then the show had already begun. They’d brought in the clowns. Even as I continued my conversation, I was already laughing.

 

~

 

While I’d hoped for a relaxing evening enjoying a show without words (yes, I’d thought, just what I need this summer, something to entertain me while my analytical and creative brain rests), I immediately found myself watching myself watch the show. It’s a thing I do—watch myself watch things—as I am interested in the movements of the mind and the nature of attention. I tried to set the habit aside, but I couldn’t. It’s not that the show was so great. I mean, it was good, don’t get me wrong. Not quite as thrilling as I’d hoped, but quite good. What kept me interested in watching my watching was the truly expert ways the show’s creators engaged, manipulated and rewarded my attention.

 

Which naturally made me think of writing poetry.

 

~

 

Engaging Attention (I): Theatre

 

Before the clowns first arrive, there is the theatre itself, designed to resemble a 14th-century European opera house, already signaling that an evening of sensuousness and surprise awaits through its deployment of rich, dark-colored materials and low lighting, overall, with architectural accents that lift the eyes both upward toward the decorated ceiling and downward toward the broad stage and the blood red curtains that shield it.

 

It would be easy to pass by the theatre in this consideration of Cirque-as-craft-revelator, but it’s actually vital that we pause here.

 

When we create a poem, we create a space in which things happen. Things happen in the mind of the poet as she writes, and in the mind of the reader as she reads. These happenings are not identical, yet they are inextricably connected through the material of the language in the context of the space the poet makes for it.

 

What, then, is the poem’s theatre? It is the page on which the words are inscribed; the object (chapbook, full-length book, literary journal, anthology, etc.) of which that page is a part; and the place (the organization, and also, the website/online bookstore/physical bookstore/conference book table/etc.) that houses that book.

 

But poems are tricky, because they aren’t only words on the page. Poems are also, are—I would argue—most importantly, the song of their words unfolding over time in the mind’s ear, either through live performance or the performance the reader gives inside herself when she sits quietly with the poem. The poem’s theatre, then, is also the place in which the writer performs it live for others, and also—both fundamentally and ultimately—the body itself, through the physical ear and through the mind’s ear.

 

This line of thinking offers us useful attention-related craft questions to consider as we write: What kind of theatres should the poet make, or seek, for a given poem? How might the poet take greater advantage of the theatre of live performance for a poem? And how might the poet take greater advantage of all the body brings to a poem when the body hears it, i.e. how might the poet take greater advantage of the poem’s inherent physicality, to engage, sustain and reward attention?

 

~

 

Engaging Attention (II): Stage

 

The stage and sets for O are stunning (don’t worry, no one paid me to say that). The centerpiece is the 1.5-million gallon pool, which supports water routines such as synchronized swimming and also acts as a landing net for some aerial performances. The stage also supports ground acts: the pool is covered over from time to time during the show with a hard cover, sometimes flooded with an inch or so of water to create a huge mirror, while at other times the water is drained away to reveal a non-reflective hard surface.

 

The designers and choreographers take the idea of using all three dimensions of the stage space to extremes. Metal grids at the sixty-foot ceiling level are integrated into the performance (think high divers) and also serve as anchor points for a variety of apparatuses (trapezes, bateau, lyra, etc.). Performers and sets use the full depth and breadth of the stage area. Within the pool itself, platforms lift and lower to create little islands or change the pool’s shape or size, and various barges traverse the water through the show. Set elements also double as safety equipment for the performers. In the bateau scene, for example, gauzy layers of gray material framing the stage are also, I realized as the scene unfolded, safety nets. During the same scene, one performer missed a catch and his flyer bailed into the pool, swam to the poolside, and using choreographed movements, sat down in a practiced way at the pool’s edge for the rest of the scene and watched the bateau—using his attention to direct mine away from him and toward the continuing performance.

 

According to the show’s website, all of the 150 technicians and 80 cast members have scuba certification, and 14 technicians work underwater during every performance.

 

What, you may be wondering, does any of this have to do with the craft of poetry?

 

Let’s work backward. First, for every performer we see above the water, two technicians work unseen to run the show. Consider what this ratio might teach us about writing: What if we said that for every word the reader sees on the page, at least two more words (denotations, connotations, extra words edited out in revision…) hover close by, unseen yet undergirding the poem’s structure. How would that invite us to think about our writing, and our revising, differently? What if, through revision, we strove to multiply potential meanings (in a way that magnifies/interconnects, not merely confuses) while at the same time disciplining ourselves to cut the actual word count of the poem down by two-thirds? Some intriguing challenges begin to offer themselves: How, when attention is condensed by two-thirds, do we work to sustain it? And how can we do better in hiding the technical trappings of our poems behind fewer words? Because, of course, seeing the safety equipment spoils the circus-poem’s illusions.

 

Now, let’s think of the poem as the stage. What elements could the poet use to take full advantage of all three dimensions—height, breadth, depth? In the circus, different apparatuses are used by performers to turn themselves upside down, sideways, to spin, to fly…what apparatuses could the poem use to turn ideas upside down, sideways, to spin them, to launch them into flight? And connected to that, what tools could the poem use to provide cleverly integrated or obscured “safety nets” to support its most challenging, risk-taking moments?

 

And lastly: How can we use the concept of staging in the poem itself in a dramatic way? In O, pool becomes hard stage becomes pool again. What approaches might we use to create a stage for our poem and then deliberately, dramatically, change the terms of that stage? In other words, how might we “pull the rug out” from under the poem’s feet, or drop the poem through a trap door, and then slip the rug back under it again, or lift the poem back up through the trap—and what could doing that offer to the poem that traditional “staging” might not?

 

~

 

Manipulating Attention (I): Comets (Butlers)

 

The show’s creators call them the Comets, but that doesn’t make any sense to me (except for their visual appearance during one specific routine). Let us call them the Butlers.

 

I dub them the Butlers because they functionally serve the show, the characters and the audience. They wear red tuxedo coats with broad tails and very historical-looking footwear, evoking the style of the late eighteenth-century. Their wigs are short and pale blond, evoking those iconic white-haired wigs. They all are costumed identically, including their face paint.

 

The Butlers help the show to begin in earnest; they are the ones who pull back the thick red curtains. As the show unfolds, they accompany characters as they enter or exit, perform choreographed assistance with scene changes that occur throughout the show, and do routines on silks as part of the weather that occurs in certain scenes. They are always either directly present or somehow alluded to or implied.

 

They are the Greek chorus.

 

As quoted in the Wikipedia article on the same: The chorus “is a homogeneous, non-individualised group of performers, who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action.” Further into to article, historian H. D. F. Kitto is quoted as arguing “that the word ‘chorus’ gives us hints about its function in the plays of ancient Greece: The Greek verb choreuo, ‘I am a member of the chorus,’ has the sense ‘I am dancing.’ The word ode means not something recited or declaimed, but ‘a song.’ The orchestra, in which a chorus had its being, is literally a ‘dancing floor.’” From this, says Wikipedia’s collective voice, “it can be inferred that the chorus danced and sang poetry.”

 

What ideas does my experience of O’s Butlers, in combination with their ur-form, the Greek chorus, offer to me as a poet? First, I am reminded that good poems manipulate the reader’s attention through strong transitions from one gesture to the next. In the poem, the Butlers exist in the forms of syntax and line, and their relation; in the form of the stanza or the verse paragraph and its relation to stanzas/verses paragraphs that precede and follow, visual arrangement on the page (a.k.a. relation to negative space) and so forth. By strong transition I don’t necessarily mean hard, but rather, well-executed such that the reader can make the poem’s leaps—however precipitous—and make it to the other side well enough to keep going.

 

The Butlers also remind me that unity is built from and through multiplicity: A unified entity “contains multitudes” as Walt Whitman famously wrote about himself (think: unison or unanimous), and/or is singular only when in relation to a multiplicity (look up unilateral to see what I mean). When I apply these musings (couldn’t resist the reference here—MUSEings!) to poetic practice, I see that the fully developed poem is a resonant unity comprised of multiplying multiplicities; for example, multiple words (as sound forms, as denotations, as connotations) and nested structures (word inside syntax inside line inside stanza/verse paragraph inside [sometimes] section inside poem inside [sometimes] book/journal/anthology) coexist and intermingle and interact in real time within the poem, just as the Butlers do on stage. Their complex and layered choreography moves the circus-poem forward in time.

 

~

 

Manipulating Attention (II): Repetition with Variation

 

I used the word gesture above, and this is a concept that the Butlers also enlarge for me. No characters speak in any recognizable language in O, but many of the individual characters mime or suggest emotions or narrative (e.g. language) through their gestures. The muteness becomes further complicated in the case of the Butlers, whose intrinsically homogeneous nature, which the choreographers enact in their highly structured unison movements, makes it seem as if they are bereft even of a physical mode of individual identity expression…

 

…at first. As the show unfolded, their very identicalness, their repetitiveness, began to frame for me how they are in fact not all the same. As they executed choreography, I watched myself become sensitized to their variations: of position within the performance space, of expression of the same maneuver, of facial shape and carriage (even from my distance in the tier, and even in spite of their identical face makeup). Soon, the minutest differentiation in their behavior became a site stirring with possibility—because sometimes, their minute differences do lead to surprises: A change in their routine, the entry of a new character, a change of scene, an explosion of rain or the rise of the moon. What first presented as something monolithic and predictable, unworthy of my notice, became yet another source of intrigue for my voracious—yet fickle—attention (a strategy poetry can use to wonderful effect).

 

Another way the O deploys repetition with variation is in the intermezzo clowns. These two simple-souled characters punctuate the moody, dramatic look and feel of the main thread of the show with their classic enormous shoes, red noses, sweetly droopy face paint, and frazzled wigs. These are the clowns I mentioned earlier, who open the show discreetly from within the audience. As clowns do, they rely on mimetic gestures and physical humor to navigate to their way through the show. Yet what I find most charming (and I mean that word in its transcendent sense, and not as a dirty word) is the way they communicate. Similar to the Muppets character Beaker, these two clowns communicate in a language of pure sounds, and only two different sounds, in fact.

 

As I watched the show, I watched myself discover their language, a triumph of repetition with variation: The phonic structure of the two sounds strictly repeats, from intermezzo act to intermezzo act, but the tonal expression of the two-sound pattern begins to evolve, and it is through its continuous evolution that the humor deepens and builds. I watched myself begin to anticipate—to desire—the next utterance, knowing I would be surprised by its new emotional direction and touched by its new layer of emotional nuance.

 

Though I shouldn’t have been surprised! Because this is exactly the way music uses repetition with variation. Perhaps you’ll recognize this famous work based on a motif of only two pitches, in a figure of only four notes, repeated and varied over and over. The same words O’s press kit uses to describe the clowns describe this piece well: “With simple, poetic gestures they convey the many complexities of life,” and I would put the emphasis here on simple. Keep it simple, I could say to my poet-self—and then keep going, seeking, exploring into the lush multiplicities always-already present in that simple, elegant initial unity.

 

~

 

Rewarding Attention (I): Association, Reverie and Dream

 

As is typical of Cirque du Soleil shows, O is heavy on drama while being lean on narrative. Or, I should say, received narrative. Instead of interpreting and performing a story, I think O’s intent is to stimulate memories, associations, and fantasies in the imaginations of its audience, such that as we watch—as we attend—we begin to tell ourselves unique stories, and these become overlaid on the performances we are witnessing and fuse into a greater-than-the-some-of-its-parts, subtly yet utterly collaborative aesthetic expression.

 

Or anyway, this is the kind of experience I watched myself have as I watched O, and this is the kind of opportunity I want my poems to offer their readers, too.

 

In addition, O contains lots of mirrorings. There are mirrorings among bodies: of cadres of performers (Butlers to Zebras to Sailors); of members of these individual cadres performing choreography in which people mirror each other; of pairs of performers intertwining themselves to create bilaterally symmetrical images. Many surfaces within the performance space also “mirror,” with the water’s surface being the most obvious of these; there is also the “mirroring” of fire and water in several cts. For me, these mirrorings suggest duality (Federico García Lorca’s aesthetic concept of the duende comes to mind here), multiplicities, and also an urge to look at oneself—to look inward. Late in the show, an actual, enormous round mirror descends from the ceiling level and hovers over the stage, rewarding the audience for attending through these mirrorings by manifesting the material object of the metaphor with surprising drama (a move I would like to steal in my poems). It reflects action on the stage and, I wonder, perhaps some of the audience members themselves.

 

~

 

Rewarding Attention (II): Breaking the Fourth Wall (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT)

 

Our discussion of the giant mirror, above, is a breaking of the fourth wall if audience members can see themselves in it—suddenly, those who see themselves in it become truly part of the show, co-performers, and co-creators in a second way. It is a thrilling moment.

 

But wait, there’s more!

 

As the show begins, so does it end: by involving the audience. As the clock ticks down, one of the characters on stage turns to the audience and gestures about selecting a volunteer. A spotlight begins to sweep around and across the audience, settling itself on an awkward man in a dark suit, from the orchestra lower right, trying to lower himself back into his seat without incident after getting from the bar the glass of beer in his hand. He is embarrassed and sheepish. He gestures the performers who have come to escort him to go away, but they plead and plead and he agrees to play along and is brought up on stage. The performers try to teach him what they want him to do, and he’s positively terrible at it…but by then it’s too late, they’ve got him climbing up a tall, tall ladder that is lifting off the stage and toward the ceiling—and soon he disappears into the machinery up there.

 

Of course, his cover’s blown: He’s no innocent audience member, but a plant! The Bellagio would never take on the liability of welcoming a true audience member on stage. We know it for sure when he performs one of the finale high dives, one of the highest of the high.

 

But we love him anyway, because he rewards our attention: He is, in fact, the materialization of our greatest fantasy, here at the end of the show, which is that we might somehow transcend our flabby, cubicle-deformed bodies and ascend to the heavens with him, and leap out into the unknown. Through him, in return for our labors of attention, we are made a bit more free before the curtain falls. Our attention, sharply focused for these many minutes, blooms as it takes in all the emotional and psychological distance it has traveled and synthesizes these into a new whole, a new understanding. My favorite poems hide such surprises in their endings.

 

~

 

THE END

 

All of these reflections may help me write better poetry, if I can rise to their challenges. They definitely will help me become a better reader of poetry, a more receptive and collaborative member of poetry’s attentive audience.

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Last Chance + Sneak Peek: Kate’s Summer and Fall 2018 Workshops

Hello Friends!

I hope you’re keeping cool on these long, hot summer days–and reading and writing! Or maybe resting? I personally took a break from my creative activities for a couple of months, for some much needed rest and refocusing after a very productive year for me, writing-wise. I normally draft about a page a month that makes it through revision, and this past year, I drafted triple that amount! I am pretty excited about it. I am also excited about getting back to the blank page next weekend.

 

If you have not yet signed up for my Summer Pop-Up Workshops, now’s your last chance to grab a spot (just a couple left!) for next Saturday, July 21, in my generative workshop called “Writing’s Country: Place and Our Writing Practice.” Email me today at kate (at) kateasche (dot) com to request the registration form! Full details, including the book to buy (right now!) over on my workshops page.

 

I’m also still taking sign ups for the August 5 workshop, “The Tin House Writer’s Notebook II: A Writing and Revising Workshop for All Genres.”

 

I also want to give you a sneak-peek at two innovative one-day workshops I’ll be offering this fall. Registration isn’t open just yet (look for my announcement in the next couple of weeks), but do please email me (kate (at) kateasche (dot) com) if you want me to add you to the short list for when I’m ready to enroll. Drumroll, please…

 

Mark your calendar now for two brand new, one-day, generative writing workshops that will take you on an interdisciplinary adventure and inspire you–through reading literature, listening to music, and experiencing specially curated docent tours at the Crocker Art Museum–to make new connections and leaps in your work as you write new drafts and share them for supportive feedback in the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) method. Workshop dates are September 9 and October 27, 2018. Enroll in one, the other, or both! They will run in sequence and make a fantastic pair.

 

Why this new workshop approach? As some folks in our writing community know, in addition to my undergrad and graduate work in poetry, I also have a minor in classical music performance (clarinet)–a big minor (I almost double-majored!)–that included musicology and music history courses, which I loved. In addition, in preparation for my study abroad semester in (way back in fall 2002), I took a series of courses in art and architectural history and design. All of this fine arts coursework dovetailed perfectly with my core (a.k.a. canonical) literature courses which, at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, are always taught in chronological sequence (we can thank the engineering-oriented administrative approach for that one!).

What this means is that, by the time I got on the plane to spend half a year studying in London and traveling Europe, I had a clear structure in my head of the basic arcs of western literature, arts, architecture and music from the ancient Greeks to the present. This period-based interdisciplinary cultural understanding was a tremendous asset as I explored London and environs, Venice and Florence and Rome, Budapest, Frankfurt and central Germany, Prague, Vienna and Paris–and on later trips to Brandenburg and Berlin, Stockholm, Krakow, southern France, Barcelona and Madrid, and Athens, Crete and the Cyclades. That mental architecture increased my understanding and, more importantly, my pleasure in the art and architecture I saw, the concerts I attended and the literature I bought in translation everywhere I went.

 

I want to share with our community opportunities for one-day immersion in this rich, period-based approach to experiencing the arts–thus, these workshops. The September workshop will focus on my version of the “Interwar Period,” which I am calling 1918 (end of World War I) to 1941 (the year the U.S. entered World War II). The October workshop will encompass the era of U.S. involvement in World War II through the Postwar era and roughly the first half of the Cold War period.

 

My hope is to continue our march through time in the winter and spring, so stay tuned for all of it!

I look forward to writing (and reading and looking and listening) with you,

Kate

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Ta-daa! It’s…Kate’s Annual Conferences & Workshops List!

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the spring installment of my annual regional conferences and workshops list! The permanent (date-less) list lives over at my Resources page, so do bookmark that, as well as use it to mark your calendar for items to check back on, as it contains events not listed here because their 2018 information is not yet available.

I’d like especially to highlight the Sacramento Poetry Center Annual Spring Conference, for which I now have the great honor of serving as the faculty coordinator. I hope to see you there–and beyond!

Happy writing,

Kate

**

Sacramento Poetry Center Annual Spring Conference

April 28

9:00 a.m. Registration; 9:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Conference

This year’s conference includes a fantastic lineup of poets from across California and as far away as Vermont! With a special lunchtime Q&A about the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference with Poetry Program Director Nan Cohen.

Sessions:

  • Poetry: The Collaborative Art of Solitude, with William O’Daly
  • Thinking Like a Poetry Editor: How to Self-Edit a Poetry Manuscript, with April Ossmann
  • The Sense in Sound, with Cintia Santana
  • Storied Poetry: Narrative Techniques as Poetic Tools, with Kirk Glaser
  • “Say her name!”: Writing the Poetry of Witness, with Raina J. León
  • Between the Lines: Writing Poems in Dialogue with Text and Myth, with Nan Cohen

Find registration info soonish at sacramentopoetrycenter.org.

Sacramento Poetry Center at 1719 25th Street
Registration Fee of $45 includes access to all three sessions for talks, all readings and lunch.
Pay at the door or send check to: SPC 1719 25th Street Sacramento, CA 95816.

**

Our Life Stories Conference

April 28

8:45 a.m. – 4:15 p.m.

The excellent long-standing cross-generational writers conference sponsored by Hart Senior Center and Cosumnes River College. Visit ourlifestories.org to view speaker bios and workshop sessions.

Cosumnes River College
8401 Center Parkway, Sacramento, CA

**

Sierra Poetry Festival

April 28

Nevada County Arts Council presents the Sierra Poetry Festival, which the Council describes on the website: “We are planning readings, open mics, workshops, discussion, youth voices and activism to celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change. We chose our theme, Ordinary Light, as a nod to our brand new United States Poet Laureate, Tracy K Smith, for the title of her award-winning memoir. We challenge our poets and our performers to interpret this as their own, and our audiences to participate with this theme in mind.” Featured poets and presenters include:

Kim Shuck, Indigo Moor, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Judy Halebsky, VS Chochezi and Staajabu as Straight Out Scribes, Neeli Cherkovski, Bill Gainer, Molly Fisk, Charles and Gail Entrekin, Sands Hall, Mel Pryor, Kirsten Casey

Cost: $25-$40, free for students with valid ID

**

WordSpring at Butte College

April 28

WordSpring is a creative writing conference put on by a small team of teachers and students who are passionate about writing. Our conference mission is to invigorate and empower our diverse local community of new and experienced writers by creating an event where they can come together while also bringing in professionals from near and far to share their expertise. This conference is an inspiring experience that leaves attendees refreshed, excited, and ready to write.

Each year the conference features a unique and engaging contest special to that conference–check out the website for more information.

The conference includes a light breakfast and buffet lunch in registration costs. WordSpring is sponsored by the English Department at Butte College and is in part supported by donations from the community and state equity grants. For more information on registration and our sonnet-writing contest email us at wordspring@butte.edu or call Professor Molly Emmons at (530) 895-2935.

**

Gold Rush Writers Conference

May 4-6

View program information and register here.

Come join the Gold Rush Writers Conference at the historic Leger Hotel in picturesque Mokelumne Hill where writing professionals will guide you to a publishing bonanza through a series of panels, specialty talks, workshops and celebrity lectures. Go one-on-one with successful poets, novelists, biographers, memoirists and short story writers. The conference includes a picnic supper in a Victorian garden Friday evening, as well as Saturday dinner and Sunday brunch.

**

Capitol Crimes Writing Retreat

June 21-24

Christ the King Retreat Center, Citrus Heights, CA

This is the retreat for you if you are ready and willing to develop your book, fine tune your manuscript, perfect your writing-in-progress, or just set aside time to write in a quiet sanctuary.

New York Times Bestselling Author, Hallie Ephron

Limited to 14 participants. Based on registration track, the retreat includes: lodging, meals, workshops, and one-on-one coaching.

$450 (Full Program)

$325 (w/o Coaching)

$50 Deposit to hold your spot.

**

Surprise Valley Writers Conference

June 2-6

2018’s program feature faculty members Greg Glazner (poetry), Debra Gwartney (nonfiction) and Christian Kiefer (fiction).

Four days of writers’ workshops; Friday afternoon, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday mornings with ample time for lunch, craft lectures, writing and exploring. Evening events include a Welcome Reception, Staff Readings, Keynote Speech, Campfire Open Mic, shared meals and community building. We also encourage attendees to write and discover Surprise Valley on your own. Our staff is available to offer suggestions on local sights, drives and adventures.

All workshops and lectures are held in downtown Cedarville.

**

Squaw Valley Community of Writers

Two different sessions, by genre, throughout June, July and August

Portions of the program are open to the public.

The Community of Writers was established in 1969 by novelists Blair Fuller and Oakley Hall, who were both residents of the valley. It was originally staffed by a band of San Francisco writers including David Perlman, Walter Ballenger, Barnaby Conrad and John Leggett, the latter two of whom went on to found, respectively, the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. The Community of Writers continues to be directed by Brett Jones.

Over the years the community has mounted workshops in Fiction, Nonfiction, Screenwriting, Playwriting, Poetry, and Nature Writing (the Art of the Wild, co-produced by Jack Hicks and University of California at Davis), and Writing the Medical Experience directed by David Watts. Lisa Alvarez and Louis B. Jones now co-direct the Fiction Program and Michael Carlisle directs the nonfiction Program of the Writers Workshop, which were for twenty years directed by Carolyn Doty. Galway Kinnell directed the Poetry Program for 17 years and Robert Hass has directed it since 2004. Diana Fuller directs the Screenwriters Workshop, founded in 1974 by screenwriters Tom Rickman and Gill Dennis.

**

Napa Valley Writers’ Conference

July 29-August 3

2018 Faculty:

  • In poetry – Camille Dungy, Brenda Hillman, Jane Mead, and Carl Phillips
  • In fiction – Lan Samantha Chang, Lauren Groff, Mat Johnson, and Howard Norman

Since 1981, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference has provided an opportunity for fellowship and serious work with a focus on craft amidst the hills and vineyards that have made the region famous. The conference is a project of Napa Valley College.

**

Mendocino Coast Writers Conference

August 2-4

2018 faculty lineup is fantastic and includes Sacramento Poet Laureate Indigo Moor and Sacramento prose fan-favorite Elizabeth Rosner–and many more!

Features nationally-recognized authors and publishing professionals who are outstanding teachers. The conference is limited to 100 participants who will discover: how to develop their literary craft in a supportive community, surrounded by the spectacular scenery and temperate climate of California’s North Coast; a place to exchange ideas with authors, editors, literary agents, and other writers of many talents, ages and backgrounds. Learning happens in workshops, seminars, panels, and during informal social gatherings; inspiration to explore how writing can shape the world. Whatever the genre, whether fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, words are a powerful instrument of change; a place where you can take creative risks, whether on the page or on the stage, and where you will be inspired to explore new ways to shape your writing. An opportunity for teachers to earn Continuing Education Units (CEUs) through Dominican University.

General registration opens March 1.

**

Writing By Writers Workshop @ Tomales Bay

October 17-21

2018 Faculty: Charles Baxter, Pam Houston, Ilya Kaminsky, Dani Shapiro, Justin Torres and Sunil Yapa

The Writing By Writers Workshop @ Tomales Bay brings aspiring writers into close community with nationally known poets and writers. Manuscript and poetry workshops are limited to 12 participants and generative workshops are limited to 15 to ensure an intimate setting.  For information on how to apply, please click here. Conference is held at at Marconi Conference Center, Marshall, California, just north of San Francisco in Marin County.

Scholarships are available and applications for these are due on May 1.

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Workshop Alum Paco Marquez Launches His Chapbook at Sacramento Poetry Center, January 8, 2018 ~ 7:30 p.m.

Happy New Year, Friends!

I am so pleased to share with you some lovely news–Paco Marquez is in town from NYC to celebrate the launch of his first chapbook collection, Portraits in G Minor (Folded Word Press, 2017)! Paco is an alumnus of my writing workshops who left Sacramento some years back to go to the poetry MFA at New York University. Paco’s work has always been stunning–full of energy, passion and a wonderful strangeness–and I am so very happy to see his work getting some much-deserved time in the spotlight.

I am honored, too, that Paco has asked me to read alongside him, and alongside Zia Torabi, at this coming Monday’s reading at SPC!

Full details of the reading are at sacramentopoetrycenter.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ziaeddin Torabi is an Iranian-American poet. He was born in 1944 in Zanjan, Iran and immigrated to U.S.A. in 2011. He started composing and reciting poems in childhood and earned a B.A. in English language and literature from Isfahan University and an M.A. in linguistics from Tehran University. Torabi has published more than 30 books, including poetry, criticisim and translation. He has won many literary awards, including the 2010 Iran Annual book Prize for his poetry collection, Face To Face With Dream, that has been translated into English by Parisa Samady and was published by Ad Luman press of American River College in 2012.

Lost

It was just noon
when I woke up

the sun was standing
in the sky, as always
watching me.

Lost in my dreams
last night
there in the desert

far from home
my homeland.


Paco Márquez is author of the chapbook Portraits in G Minor (Folded Word Press, 2017). His work has appeared in Apogee, Ostrich Review, Live Mag!, Huizache, Occupoetry, and Late Peaches: Poems by Sacramento Poets. One of his poems went up on a public mural through Sacramento’s Del Paso Words & Walls Project. He was featured on Columbia University’s WKCR 89.9 FM’s “Studio A,” and in “I Know No Country,” a short film directed by Antonio Salume which won NYU’s Spring 2016 Sight & Sound Documentary Film Festival. Recipient of fellowships from New York University, The Center for Book Arts, and the Squaw Valley Writer’s  Workshop, he holds and MFA in poetry from NYU, where he was poetry editor of Washington Square. Paco is a member of Los Escritores del Nuevo Sol and for several years he was a board member of the Sacramento Poetry Center. He lives in New York City with his partner of 12 years.


Kate Asche’s poetry is forthcoming in DIAGRAM and Canary and has appeared in Santa Clara Review, The Pinch, The Missouri Review (as an Audio Prize finalist) and in Colorado Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Our Day in the Labyrinth, debuted in 2015 from Finishing Line Press. Ms. Asche invests time in building literary community/ies. A graduate of the UC Davis Creative Writing program, she teaches workshops in Sacramento and is the faculty coordinator for the Sacramento Poetry Center Spring Conference. She co-edited the Sacramento Poetry Center’s journal, Tule Review, was associate editor for Under the Gum Tree and read for Memoir Journal. From 2005 to 2011, she coordinated The Tomales Bay Workshops under the direction of Pam Houston. She helped to establish the award-winning I Street Press at Sacramento Public Library and hosts a literary events blog at www.kateasche.com/ katesmiscellany.

by Kate Asche
(Originally published in The Pinch 37.2)

A STUDY OF PREPOSITIONS

Rain translates remoteness to hush
by disrupting the volume of the air.

Rain translates nearness to time
by disrupting volatile bodies—

aromas of wild cucumber and fennel,
coyote mint—

as it falls both louder and quieter
where I pass under an oracle oak.

I want to say after the drought,
but I stop myself.

What if after isn’t?

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The Art of the Collection: Readings by the Poets of Kate Asche’s 2016-17 Monthly Workshop ~ Monday, October 23 ~ 7:30 p.m. ~ Sacramento Poetry Center

Over a period of eight months in 2016-17, Kate Asche led a group of women poets on a transformational journey into the art of poetry collection-making. These poets (including Kate) collected their poems into chapbook/book manuscripts and shared these collections for extensive workshop feedback, which led to revision across poems through a developing “collection consciousness” as well as revision focused within individual poems. In many cases, new poems also grew out of the workshop feedback. On October 23, join this incredible group of writers at Sacramento Poetry Center to celebrate the challenges, discoveries and triumphs they experienced during this truly one-of-a-kind workshop.

 

KATE ASCHE, M.A., is a writer, teacher, editor and literary community builder working in Sacramento. her first poetry collection, the chapbook Our Day in the Labyrinth, debuted in fall 2015.

 

from “Vestigia (Thursday of Mysteries)”

 

What creature isn’t made from cruel vestiges?

Legless pelvises, sightless eyes, flightless wings—whose traces?

 

I recall my friend, her belly’s grapefruit-sized bundle of teeth and hair.

Some days, faith feels like a vanishing twin, the merest trace.

 

**

 

BETHANIE HUMPHREYS is a writer, editor, mixed media visual artist and curator. Her goal is to further the cross-pollination of the literary and visual arts.

 

From “Cephalopod”

 

I taste what I touch

but I swim headfirst

 

no bones to hinder

I slip in and out of tight spaces

 

**

 

JENNY JIANG spends any free time she can squeeze out of her days to ramble along the American River with the people she loves.

 

From “Rhubarb, Ars Poetica”

 

Although it tastes mostly like pasty goo inside lumpy, pasty flour,

I still carry rhubarb back to California, in baggies in my checked luggage.

 

Because we live in a made world: fields and furrows,

brocaded hallways. We sing the old songs because they sing to us.

 

**

 

HEATHER JUDY is a poet and artist. When pressed to write a 25 word bio, she realized nothing really matters. She sees words in color.

 

You, thirst, dusty dusk, dark

and dawn and dew. Black bird,

black bird, crow, bird. Land

my palm.

 

**

 

LISA LUDDEN is the author of the chapbook Palebound. She is grateful to be reading with these fantastic women poets this evening.

 

From “Tending”

 

In the shift from one to another,

a turn from the body to breath in relief.

 

We are not far from ourselves.

We’re just not sure how to get back.

 

 

**

 

MARIANNE M. PORTER earned an MFA in Creative Writing in 2014. She’s fine-tuning her collection of short stories and enriches her life with poetry.

 

From “Notes from Paula”

 

My mother-in-law loved the shoreline,

named all the birds, fished for king salmon

 

in open water beyond the bend of Monterey

Bay. I found her handwritten notes—

 

**

MARTHA STROMBERGER is a member of the Fall 2017 cohort of the UC Davis Creative Writing Master’s program.

 

And when the wet branches

of her lungs shuddered

and contracted in that first tender

alarm cry at His              absence

 

**

 

BETH SUTER is a Pushcart Prize nominee with pieces forthcoming in Presence and Calyx.  She lives in Davis with her husband and son.

 

From “Ode to the Sacramento Valley”

 

I learned to love yellow to live here

your goldfinches and star thistle

your ten kinds of deer grass

the color of my son’s fawn hair

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Letters from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference 2017

The Napa Valley Writers’ Conference of July 2017 was a fantastic six days of writing, learning, and working (and yes, drinking wine!) in community with dozens of amazing writers. Here, I share a bit of the participant experience, including notes from the poetry craft talks (many of which will be relevant to all genres) and from my time working with Jane Hirshfield. Enjoy! ~Kate

**

 

Sunday, July 23

 

Hello, Friend!

 

I left Sacramento at noon today, and my car said it was already 102 degrees and climbing! What a relief that I get to beat this heat—and leave behind and incredibly exciting but also stressful season of change and opportunity at my day job—and give myself this gift of deep time with my writing practice and with other practitioners. I know you, too, experience how challenging it is to disengage from commitments, from central relationships (my wonderfully supportive husband, a full-time student right now, will fend for himself to give me this time) and even from healthful habits (bye bye, running and yoga, this week!) to give yourself dedicated space-time for intensive creation. So I don’t have to tell you that I’m pretty burned out from all the preparation needed to get myself here, and I’m feeling amped up: partly anxious, partly excited, partly exhausted.

 

My first stop as I drove north up the Napa Valley was my community housing location. As an (extremely) grateful fellowship recipient, I was assigned “a room of my own” in a simple, beautiful home in the hills northwest of Napa. Henni and Lee, my hosts, welcomed me with warmth and interest in poetry and in my particular practice of it, as I gave them a copy of my chapbook and some delicacies from my local farmer’s market—and then moved into their guestroom for the week! (Side note—this year at Napa, a huge percentage of participants received some kind of support, well over half, if my memory serves. That is AMAZING and speaks to the incredible community this conference has built over the decades since its founding!)

 

Next stop was Orientation at the Upper Valley Campus of Napa Valley Community College in Saint Helena. This tiny campus—just a few classrooms, a small library, and a culinary arts building—is the perfect size for the conference. At the orientation, we met and heard a bit from each person on the incredible conference team. We met briefly with our workshop groups, and the poetry workshop participants received a model poem and the first of our daily assignments. Unfortunately, Jane couldn’t join us for the first meeting, as she was still recovering from a bug she picked up on a recent trip, but we looked forward to meeting her in the morning. Then, it was off to the welcome reception and our first glasses of the week’s many delicious wines, followed by the first of our meals prepared at the culinary school. The evening finished off with readings by Ada Limón and Daniel Orozco on the lawn.

Ada Limon in the opening night reading.

I arrived back at my homestay around 10:00 p.m. My hosts had recently returned from a dinner party and we talked a bit about our evenings and a little more about poetry—and then I finally sat down to do my homework! This room, formerly belonging to my hosts’ daughter, is made for a writer. It contains an amazingly comfortable bed, a sturdy chair, a big white desk fitted perfectly into its nook, and excellent lighting. I set up my laptop and printer (I brought my own, because poetry workshops have a hard manuscript deadline of 8:55 a.m. each morning, and I don’t want to have to wait in line at the computer lab) and got to work.

 

A peach, a poem and a prompt–day one homework!

 

I came to Napa with a few different poem ideas in mind, and the first daily prompt connected to one of these, so I got to work drafting an occasional poem about the closing of Tomich Orchards in Orangevale, CA, where I’ve bought stone fruit and figs for seventeen summers of the 120 they’ve been around. It’s 1:00 a.m. now, and I had something that looks poem-y enough, so I’m calling it a day and collapsing into bed. Thankfully, the hills around my homestay are quiet, save the occasional crunching of leaves by deer as they make their way from yard to yard, munching in the dark.

 

Farewell for now,

Kate

**

 

Monday, July 24

 

Dear One,

 

Morning comes earlier here than it does back home—at 6:30, I got myself up, but was moving so slowly that I had to skip showering (good thing the Napa evening was deliciously cool!). I ate some nectarines, yogurt and muesli I’d brought from home. I *know* I am not a morning person, and I wasn’t sure I’d have time to grab a bite before dropping off my manuscript at 8:55 a.m. (for copying for the class) and running to the 9:00 a.m. poetry craft talk. The snacks from home were a good move—I made it to everything, but just in time!

 

The Napa Valley Writers’ Conference has the wonderful tradition of daily poetry and fiction craft talks. These last one hour and offer a luxuriously detailed glimpse into a particular aspect of craft in each respective genre—and into the particular thinking of each faculty member.

 

Jane Hirshfield gave the first craft talk of the week, called “It Is Solved by Walking.” I’ll share with you now, in a series of single lines in italics (to indicate my paraphrase of Jane’s words), the moments from this talk that continue to most resonate with me.

 

The important thing is there be a question whose answer is not simple, direct or single.

 

To say “I bless” is to bless, is to have blessings to give, for the poem’s duration.

 

Poems create time and space that their own experience and the reader’s are able to walk through.

 

Walk, as travel, as path, as simplified intention.

 

The act of pilgrimages tests faith even as it reaffirms it.

 

Homeleaving turns the person toward the possible and the accidental.

 

Art changes the seen to the witnessed.

 

Jane’s talk, as you can see from the bones of it here, was gorgeous and inspiring! And we walked (Ha! That pun was accidental, and apt!) directly from it into our first class meeting, in which Jane welcomed us and urged us to “Experiment, risk, and surprise yourself with the work of the daily poems. Enjoy your own creative vastness.” Yes, please!

 

And from that exhilarating exhortation, we jumped into the poems each of us had drafted the night before, hearing each read aloud by its writer, echoing back existing strengths, and then offering questions, confusions and some suggestions, and jotting notes all the while.

 

One note I made was from a classmate, who shared her practice of keeping a “word palette”—lists of words that she likes, for various reasons (sound, visual appeal on the page, etc.). This practice allows her to see how her tastes, interests and obsessions evolve over time. This idea seems fascinating to me. It’s something I’ve done in my head (the lists, therefore, being very short!) for years, but the idea of writing it down never occurred to me. I want to try it!

 

Jane created an extremely supportive yet rigorous workshop space from the start. It was fantastic! At the end of todays’ class, we received an intricate prompt involving a series of self-generated lists, with the rule that we must write a poem that includes one item from each of the thirteen lists—yikes! I left class feeling pretty intimidated. I’d already written the poem I’d felt burning hottest inside me. Where would I find the same energy for another, so soon?

 

From class, we all made our way across the courtyard to the culinary school, where we picked up our plated lunches, and then seated ourselves with new workshop friends. Lunch gets eaten pretty quickly at Napa, because many participants in both genres try to make the fiction panels, too, and these follow immediately after lunch. I decided before arriving that I would not try to make these panels. I have learned in the last few years that I need to protect my time for sleep, so I committed to skipping the fiction panels (which I hear are excellent) to make time for socializing and working on my poems.

 

After lunch ended, I looked around, hoping to find folks to join in conversation, but the courtyard and lawn were empty! At first, the very extroverted part of me was disappointed. I wanted to make friends and network! With no one to talk to—everyone was either at the fiction panel, or holed up somewhere writing tomorrow’s poem or finishing last-minute fiction critiques—and not wanting to waste twenty five minutes driving back to my homestay, just to have to commute back to Saint Helena again for the evening reading, I selected one of the empty, shaded Adirondack chairs at the far end of the lawn. A few other conferees, including Ryan, one of my classmates, sat among them, quietly working. I settled in for an afternoon of writing.

 

That is, I tried to settle in. It took a few minutes for me to switch gears from my extroverted, networking “conference” self to my more inward, poem-drafting self, but once I had, I began to taste the full flavor of this conference, from the poets’ perspective: Those of us working on the lawn chairs maintained a respectful, collaborative silence. The wifi was intermittent and, thus, another distraction easily eliminated. I turned my phone to silent and dropped it, face down, into my bag. The temperate, breezy afternoon unfurled before me. I wrote.

 

For three hours, I wrote. And I got a decent draft! It was overtly political (among other things)—a way of being I shy away from in my poems as well as my life, and in which I feel unpracticed. It incorporated the second of three poem ideas I’d brought with me. I felt tired but also very satisfied after writing it—I had risked something, as Jane has asked us to.

 

I packed up and joined many of the conferees and community members at Gott’s Roadside for the evening’s “Dine and Donate” event, where the food, the milkshakes, the cool breeze and the writerly company made for a golden light-rimmed meal at redwood-stained picnic tables on the deep green lawn.

 

From Gott’s we ambled across the street to the first of our off-campus readings, in a barrel room at Merryvale Vineyards, one of Napa’s oldest continuously producing wineries. We sipped the very fine wines as we enjoyed readings by Eavan Boland and ZZ Packer.

Pre-reading tasting at Merryvale, with workshop-mates Wendy and Ryan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waaaay down there at the end of the barrel room: Eavan Boland reads at Merryvale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once again, I arrived home around 10:00 pm, and this time, I printed my poem, packed my bag for the morning, and went straight to bed!

 

Buonanotte,

Kate

**

 

Tuesday, July 25

 

My Dear Friend,

 

I awoke feeling pretty good today, which is a major achievement for me when I’m sleeping away from home. (Another reason it’s so hard—and so important—for to make space for experiences like this one, so that I don’t become too afraid of the limits of my body and opt out of the challenges and rewards of intensive experiences like this.)

 

I’d printed my daily poem before going to sleep, and packed my bag, and I lucked out with a decent hair day, so I skipped showering (again), chatted with my hosts for a few moments over tea and then arrived on campus with time to turn in my poem and enjoy breakfast before gathering for Matthew Zapruder’s craft talk.

 

Matthew’s talk was super practical. He spoke for about twenty minutes about his own practices, and then provided a series of (often quite elaborate) exercises for generating material.

 

Some helpful takeaways from Matthew’s talk included the idea that generating material and drafting a poem are sometimes the same thing, but often (for Matthew and many writers) two separate processes. Along with this idea came the idea of getting comfortable with waste. I think a lot of us writers who have many mandatory commitments in our lives—day job(s), partner/spouse, kids, care for elders, health issues, etc. etc. etc.—feel deeply pressured to make every little thing we jot in our notebooks (if we even have notebooks) “good.” Matthews talk went a long way in freeing me from this unhelpful self-pressure and allowing me to get more comfortable with the idea that “wasted” effort—jottings, notes, even full poem drafts that “don’t make it” finally into a poem—is not wasted at all, but is in fact a critical part of the process, and an essential way that we can keep our minds in training, all the time, primed for image, metaphor, symbol and other key forms of association that turn notes into a fully expressed poem. In Matthew’s view, a key strategy for generating lots of material is to work with (sometimes quite elaborate) exercises that over-occupy the conscious mind so that the less conscious, the un-self-conscious, the un-self-critical minds can come out and play.

 

I left Matthew’s talk inspired to write more and to waste more in my practice. Of course, at Napa, having to generate one poem a day kind of counters this idea of allowing for waste—to me, it feels like there is more pressure here than ever to make every word count! I do hope to try out Matthew’s exercises…at home.

 

After the craft talk we headed to class and continued to explore each other’s drafts. A key point from Jane in today’s class was that poems need to go beyond the personal. “We want readers’ experiences,” said Jane, “to leap, and not sag, when it comes to ethics. Poems need to take their full moral authority.” Jane also said “When we are wrung by life, we speak truth.”

 

As class ended today, I actually looked forward to the quiet time that would follow lunch. I sensed this meant I had fully clicked in to the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference culture—and this thought made me smile! Ryan also headed for the Adirondacks after lunch—already, this having become what we do—and along with several of the same few other conferees, we scribbled, stared into space, typed and mumbled to ourselves through the shady afternoon.

My writing spot for the week.

 

At 4:00 p.m., Ryan and I packed up and headed down the highway a bit, to Tra Vigne, a fantastic pizza place I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying once before, to meet up with two other classmates, Wendy and Elizabeth. There, we shared a bit more about ourselves and swapped intel on poetry podcasts, other conferences, and on the book projects we’re all at work on.

 

Tonight’s readings by Jane Hirshfield and Peter Ho Davies were held at Robert Mondavi Winery, a key Napa institution and long-time supporter of the conference. I was delighted to connect with writer-friends from home at the reading: Valerie Fiorvanti and Jen Palmares Meadows came to enjoy the event (Valerie has hosted Peter Ho Davies in several Sacramento literary programs throughout recent years), so I got to catch up with them—so much easier done at the conference than at home, sadly, because we are all so busy! The other fun surprise was the arrival of my friend and mentor, Sacramento Poet Laureate Indigo Moor, a Napa Valley Writers’ Conference alumnus, who was invited to give the introduction for Jane’s reading (and a very fine introduction it was!). Jane’s reading was lovely, including work from her most recent book, The Beauty, as well as new work. Peter’s reading was super strong, too—and quite atmospheric, as the power went out all around the valley for a good twenty minutes of it, and we all created the most wonderfully hushed space in which for him to read, unplugged, as sunset light streamed through the glass ceiling.

Jane Hirshfield reads from her newest collection of poems, The Beauty, in a truly beautiful place.

 

Unexpected company! Valerie Fioravanti and Jen Palmares Meadows came over from Sacramento for the Jane Hirshfield-Peter Ho Davies reading.

 

And more riches: After the reading ended, Valerie, Jen, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference Fiction Director Lakin Khan and I met up at a bistro down the highway to enjoy candlelit coffee and dessert, and talk about the news in our lives as writers and people. I first met Lakin though Valerie several years ago, I can’t remember where, and we’ve kept in touch at various Associated Writing Programs (AWP) annual conferences.

 

And when I arrived home, one of my hosts, Lee, had left a clipping from the New York Times Book Review, a review of Adam Zagajewski’s Slight Exaggeration, with a note on it asking me question about how poems work. I look forward to replying in writing. How delightful to begin this correspondence with my hosts!

 

What deeply relaxing ways to end a fantastic day!

 

Er, not quite end it. Because you-know-who still had to print out her poem for the morning. And that, dear one, was my downfall.

 

Because I’d jumped off my no-caffeine wagon and had a decaf cappuccino, and it had energized me a bit, and because of course I couldn’t print my draft without giving it one last read—and make just this one little nip, which led to a tuck, and pretty soon it was 1:20 a.m. (says the file time stamp on my hard drive, to prove it!) and I was finally printing it, having revised it through four versions *and* become inspired and revised two other existing poems in the meantime.

 

This, my friend, is what the poetry experience at Napa is all about: diving deeply into your drafting practice, so deeply that you begin encountering answers to questions about other, existing poems you didn’t know you had, and you begin knowing what to do with those answers, and—gift of all gifts—you have the time to go and do it.

 

So I am going to bed, finally, at 2:00 a.m. I know it will hurt when I wake up—I know it will be a good hurt, a hurt I’ll remember and thirst for, once back in my “real” life.

 

Ciao for now,

Kate

**

 

Wednesday, July 26

 

Hi Again—

 

Today, I woke up groggy and stiff—from the late hours, and also from doing so much sitting, even more than I do during my normal work-a-day life. Even though I went to bed really late, I set my alarm a bit early and made time for thirty minutes of yoga on the deck at the house. A thin fog still wove through low points in the valley, but on the deck, morning sun warmed my muscles and helped me find more energy.

 

Once on campus, having just made the manuscript deadline, I beelined for the breakfast buffet, stuffed a couple of pastries in a napkin and shoved them into my bag for later, and then found a seat in Eavan Boland’s craft talk, “Using Images in a Poem.” The talk, which I found quite fascinating, actually was more about using images to build figures than simply creating images. Here are my notes:

 

According to Eavan, modern poetry has undergone a fundamental shift in speaking consciousness, away from the “we” of the poetry of millennia to the contemporary “I.” She says that when the “we” was lost, the “I” had to begin carrying much more. Eavan believes this shift has affected how images are constructed and used. And here she comes to a point that is quite illuminating for me: Eavan suggests that simile and metaphor are not merely subtypes of the same category (metaphor) differentiated simply by their syntactical construction (the math here is mine: simile = x is like y, whereas metaphor = x is y). Rather, simile is (quoting Eavan here) “an agreed comparison (which can contain contrast) based on shared context that is descriptive of existing meaning.” Historically, Eavan notes, simile comes from epic literature and is “based on the consensus of common sense of what could be perceived, and used to describe the unperceivable.” Metaphor differs, in that it is “a revealed comparison. When we leave the poem, it is gone. It is organic to the situation and revelatory of it. It generates new meaning.” I left the craft talk with a whole new sense of nuance within simile and metaphor, and ready to test these theories in my own work!

 

From this heady conversation, we went straight to workshop to share our newest poems. I loved the way Jane described strong poems in class today as having “the tension of a flag pulled by wind. Some waysshe suggested we can more our poems into greater tension are by avoiding “thinky grammar” or prose-y-ness, taking mental gestures out, and by removing “damnable expletives” (someone else’s quote, but I didn’t write down whose) like forms of “it is,” i.e. aspects of reality or image that can be contained within stronger verbs and nouns.

 

As class ended, I texted a longtime friend of mine who lives in Napa, a poet and essayist I don’t get to see much these days. She is busy creating a life of enrichment and exploration for her toddler son, and I am busy supporting my creative practice and my husband’s full time degree work through my jobs. Happily, she and her son were able to meet me on the lawn at campus for a picnic lunch. Between frisbee throws and moments in contemplation of garbage trucks, my friend and I caught up on our lives and literary interests.

 

But of course, I had more homework to do, so as the visit ended, I found a quiet corner in the library to work on my daily poem, the afternoon having grown warm and my shoulders having grown a bit pink from kid time in the sun. I had arranged to meet classmates for dinner before the evening reading, but I got caught up in my work and left campus later than planned. Traffic was pretty bad, so I ended up grabbing a sandwich for dinner solo. I used this time to complete a thank-you letter to the donors who funded my fellowship (big name people—I was surprised and honored to receive their support).

 

Soon, it was time to find my way to Pine Ridge Winery, for readings by Matthew Zapruder and Lan Samantha Chang. Pine Ridge was beautiful! A smaller winery (by Napa standards), tucked up against one of Napa’s characteristic tiny hills along Silverado Trail, it boasts an intricate web of wine caves tunneled into the hill. The reading was hosted deep in one of these—with a fault line purportedly visible in the rock of one of the walls! We all said our various prayers at that moment, you bet! It was one of the most dramatic settings for a reading I’ve ever seen, and the readers certainly rose to the occasion.

Matthew Zapruder reads in the uber-dramatic wine caves at Pine Ridge.

 

Another thing I liked about Pine Ridge is that it is five minutes away from my homestay! So I was able to get home quickly and finish another draft for class before it got too late. I wrote a thank-you card to my hosts and then replied to Lee with a note on the Zagajewski book review and propped it on the kitchen table, where he will see it tomorrow morning. And though it’s “only” 11:30 tonight, I am fading fast and ready for sleep.

 

Until tomorrow,

Kate

 

I became pen-pals with my host Lee for the week!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**

 

Thursday, July 27

 

Hello, Fellow Word Artist:

 

As if things could get any better—today is my birthday! And I don’t want to be anywhere else, doing anything else. Contented presence…a wonderful present!

 

Ada Limón’s craft talk this morning was the last of the four. (I can’t believe this week is almost over already!). Ada’s talk was titled “On Duende and the Ladder: Mystery and Hope in Poetry.” It was fantastic! Even Jane told Ada it was the best talk of the four, and while I am not sure about that—they were all excellent—Ada’s was definitely the clearest, and the perfect tone to end on.

 

Ada said that “poetry is spoken by a body that is both living and dying.” She wants poems to contain both of these energies. She reviewed Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende, noting that poems containing this energy are aware of death, point earthward/are earthy in their content, embrace the irrational/the magical/surprise, and are driven by some kind of obsession, e.g. the “diabolical” (another of Lorca’s words) and struggle.

 

Ada went on to pair the duende with the concept of the ladder out, e.g. toward hope. Aspects of the ladder include: the desire for poetry to be a place for radical hope; poetry that acknowledges death while still celebrating life; poetry that practices presence and gratitude; and poetry as a place in which pain transforms. Ada wondered if a lyric poem can offer hope and/or duende without an autobiographical narrative? And finally, can a poem be energized by the duende while also offering hope?

 

Ada went on to explore these dual/dueling energies through several perfectly illustrative examples by contemporary poets. In one, the idea arose that the act of writing itself can be the ladder’s energy. Of another example, Ada said she’d heard the poet Marie Howe say, “If you want to figure out what your poem’s trying to do, put in the words ‘I want.’” Of another example, Ada noted that writing in form can create something like a duende-esque, “diabolical” struggle with the form itself. Ada ended by suggesting that “sometimes poems fail because we aren’t letting the mess in.”

 

Ada ended her talk with a list of ways into playing with the duende and the ladder. We all left Ada’s talk totally inspired to duke it out with, and within, our work!

 

We settled into workshop once again. Today, one of our class poems prompted Jane to give a lovely condensed talk on the haibun form, a Japanese form I play with periodically in my practice that combines both haiku and prose. Jane also spoke about parataxis (the placing of clauses or phrases one after another, without words to indicate coordination or subordination) and how this form of syntax powerfully signals pain, e.g. I can barely say these few words and then must stop.

 

Class ended, and after lunch, I got to enjoy a key moment of the conference: My one-on-one meeting with Jane Hirshfield. I had brought two questions to ask Jane, and a poem for her to look at.

 

First, I asked a question that will help me finish the book list for my 2017-18 monthly poetry workshop: What are the best poetry craft and criticism books by women writers?

 

Jane and I generated this list together: Addonizio and Laux’s The Poet’s Companion (which I read as an undergrad and was so inspired by) and Mary Oliver’s Poetry Handbook, as well as Louise Gluck’s essays Proofs and Theories (I’ve skimmed it an it’s an interesting mishmash of personal essays on the writing life and process plus critical pieces on specific poets), Marianne Moore’s Collected Prose, Virginia Woolf’s essays, Eavan Boland’s two co-written books with Norton (The Making of a Poem, on forms, and The Making of a Sonnet; I have both and like them). Independently, I also discoverd Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (quite professorial in tone, but very smart and contains some points I haven’t discovered anywhere else). There are also Ellen Bryant Voigt’s The Flexible Lyric, which I personally found hard to connect with, and her Graywolf Art of series contribution, The Art of Syntax, which I find a bit more accessible. An anthology that has some good short pieces by women writers is Beyond Confession. I also like portions of Lyn Hejinian’s The Language of Inquiry.

 

I also asked Jane who she believes are the most under-read important contemporary women poets. Her response to that includes, in no particular order, Marie Howe, Jean Valentine, Wisława Szymborska, Kay Ryan, Linda Gregg, Linda Gregerson—and with that we got on “Linda” loop including my additions of Linda Bierds as well as Lynda Hull, and then Jane also mentioned Linda Pastan. Jane also mentioned Dorianne Laux as a poet whose work has gone through lots of evolution over time.

 

Many of these books and authors will make appearances in my 2017-18 poetry workshop!

 

Then, Jane and I briefly line-edited my day’s draft poem together. It was an amazing learning experience! She helped me see how the poem’s title could do more of the scene-setting work, and how this would allow the poem to start in a more image-oriented, musically rich place. She helped me see how, in places where the rhythm was forced or faltering, the movement of thought also faltered. And she saw right away how much I continued to struggle with the ending, and observed quite correctly that part of this struggle was a sense and syntax I’d arrived at that (totally unconsciously on my part) closely echoed the ending of William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”—a poem I haven’t read in at least a dozen years! It was startling to see how I had so internalized that moment of music that it felt like my own, and how it was this attachment that me down a path to an ending that did not satisfy the demands of the poem. Jane helped me see with greater clarity the moral center of the poem and proposed cuts, changes in rhetorical moves, and even more specific imagery to help drive the poem deeper into its anxiety and questioning. I left elated!

 

With Jane’s comments still fresh in my mind, I settled one more time into the lawn chairs, and later into the library, to work on my final homework poem of the conference, trying to get it to a place where I could feel comfortable (enough) reading it later tonight, at the open mic. The reading comes with a strict two-minute limit. I timed my poem, and it just fit. Great!

Community night with workshop-mates Peg, Wendy, Elizabeth and Sara.

But first, it was time for the annual Community Night reception and dinner. This annual event brings community housing hosts, donors, former conference staff and other supporters of the program together with the conferees to connect around the literary arts. I was so happy my hosts, Henni and Lee, were able to attend! During the reception, I met many other community members, including a former dean of Napa Valley Community College and her artist husband, and was so impressed by the breadth of the generosity, and the depth of connection, this conference enjoys within the community—and how much it gives back. For example, since the evening readings are open to the public, the conference offers daily talks on that night’s authors at the local library. The Napa Valley chapter of the California Writers’ Club has a table at the conference. And Readers’ Books in Sonoma trucks books all around the valley, to different locations every day, making sure we all can access the very best among the works of the conference faculty and more.

Group dinner with Jane!

Group dinner with Jane!

At Jane’s request, our workshop group shared dinner together, which was a highlight of the conference for me. It was wonderful to feel the energy of all of us together in a space outside the workshop room, in a different way of relating.

My delightful homestay hosts.

Soon after dinner, the evening’s reading began out on the lawn. Lakin Khan celebrated the end of her tenure as fiction director by reading a delightful smorgasbord of her recent work across genres. Then the open mic began, and I did read the piece I worked on this afternoon with Jane. But because I took a moment beforehand to thank the conference community for a wonderful week—and a perfect birthday!—my poem ran slightly over and I had to rush the end. Drat! Even so, it felt good to read something so rough in front of a huge group of community members, peers and faculty. I haven’t done that in a long time!

My very own self, reading very fresh, still in-progress work at the open mic.

 

It was a gorgeous night for the community dinner and open mic!

 

When I arrived home I saw that, Lee, my host, received my reply on the review, and has written me back on a sheet of lined yellow legal paper. I’ll reply tomorrow—I have to finish my final poem of the week first!

 

So for now, I must bid goodnight,

Kate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**

Friday, July 28

 

Good Morning, Friend,

 

I am worn out! In finishing my workshop poem, I again became inspired to revise several more—and decided, since it was the final night, I’d just go for it. I stayed up until almost 2:00! Thankfully, my incredible hosts have agreed to let me come back for my things after the conference ends at lunch time.

 

I made the 8:55 a.m. deadline the final time (phew!) and attended the poetry first books panel. It was exciting to see Phyllis Meshulam, one of my classmates, featured on the panel for her book that came out the week before the conference! Another panelist, Marcene Gandolfo, is a Sacramento native, and a third, Eric Sneathen, is a fellow UC Davis Creative Writing Program alum. Good times!

 

From the first books panels, we made our way to our final workshop meeting, where we shared a final round of poems and then enjoyed open Q&A with Jane. Our group then exchanged contact info and shared lunch, and—just like that—it was all over. We hugged and said goodbye and began our drives down the valley.

 

I made my way back to my homestay, packed my things, and said one more thank you and farewell to Lee, who had just arrived home from a charity golf tournament.

 

I got in the car and quickly found myself back in my other life, my usual life: sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-80 in triple digit heat! But I felt inside me more space than I arrived with, and in this space—which felt shady and green, lit by the light of the musing I did on the Adirondack—I found a new level of commitment to my work as poet, both on the page in the world.

 

Much love,

Kate

**

 

August 20, 2017

 

Hello Again, My Friend!

Lee’s reply, part of our impromptu exchange of notes during the week.

It’s been so busy since I returned that I haven’t had a chance to send my final reply to Lee until now. So this post-script, or sorts, is addressed to Lee.

 

Lee, to your comment that poetry must start from “an initial essence, an initial appeal, and then one can go from there,” my response is: I think we are saying the same thing! For me, the initial essence or appeal is the possibility the writing and reading of poetry afford me to live more deeply. Sometimes a question or situation that continues to hold mystery, longing or pain for me prompts me to write a poem. Sometimes I give myself a prompt or exercise that helps me find my way to such a question or situation through the act of writing. And when I read the work of others, I read to find myself within mysteries I hadn’t conscious known, or known in a particular way. For me, the appeal is in the opportunity to experience more, know more, feel more of what it is to be human here on earth, now and through time. I find that writing and reading toward more and different expressions of what being human is leads me—often against my prideful individual will and in the face of my compelling individual fears!—toward a more humane way of living, which is, for me, another way of saying that poetry leads me toward grace.

 

This is one of the great paradoxes of art: The further we creators travel inward through our work to find and explore the memories, visions and questions that pursue us, the closer we come to touching the experiences of others. We meet others, and others meet us, in the intimate, communal space our poem, our story, our artwork creates. I can’t remember when exactly this good and oft-made point was offered during the conference (I think it may have been in one of the workshop sessions with Jane, or in comments at one of the poetry craft talks, but I have no notes, only the memory), but it was made: The transformation of personal experience or questioning into art, e.g. a public experience, is always political, and even more so when the transformation occurs in the context of oppression, both overt and denied. Our burden to seek and speak truth is as heavy as ever in this moment.

 

And with these thoughts, my unforgettable week at Napa truly draws to a close. I look forward to attending again one day!

 

To all my workshop mates, to the conference staff, to the donors, to my hosts Henni and Lee, and especially to Jane: Thank you for a most exhilarating, challenging, and inspiring week!

 

Yours in writing,

Kate

 

 

 

 

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