Poetry Workshop with Therese Broderick

Crazy Grass: Poetry At Ease

In this workshop, we will learn how to relax with our poems, whether our poems be happy or sad, angry or serene, questing afar or delving within. Each two-hour session will include: three minutes of OPTIONAL seated and simple moving of head, hands, feet; fifteen minutes of sharing our insights from the previous day; thirty minutes of writing from a daily prompt; ten minutes for a break; thirty minutes of OPTIONAL reading aloud from our writing or from the writing of a favorite author; twenty minutes exploring a topic chosen by the participants; ten minutes of closure. No previous experience with poetry is required.

Therese L. Broderick, MFA, MLS, has served the community of writers in Albany, New York, for more than nineteen years in numerous roles, including board officer, contest judge, classroom guest poet, and facilitator for the Albany Area Poetry Chat monthly discussions. Her poems have been published in many venues, both paper (Poet Lore) and digital (Barzakh); and have received several awards, including an Intro Journals Project prize from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and the Overall Winner prize from The Poetry Project with Poetry Ireland. She is the author of four chapbooks, the most recent of which, Green-Weak, is available for free at https://redwolfjournal.wordpress.com. Her first full-length collection, Breath Debt: Poems, was published in 2018 and is available at http://www.pagepublishing.com/books/?book=breath-debt Therese can be found on Twitter, Goodreads, and her WordPress blog entitled Poet Apace.

Fiction Workshop with Clif Travers

Keeping it Brief:

The Pleasures and Pains of Writing Short Fiction.

What makes any story come alive on the page? Is it the plot? The characters? A situation? Good dialogue? And what makes it a short story?

 

These are questions all writers confront in the process of telling a tale. In this workshop we will discuss the elements of good writing and how they apply to short fiction. We will read three short stories by authors who have dealt with these principles differently, and we will write our own pieces based on the elements discussed. We’ll do writing exercises that will address the above questions, and then we’ll analyze what “works” and why.

           

Writing can be fun, but it’s also hard work. We’ll be doing both.

Clif Travers is a visual artist and writer, recently relocated to the woods of Maine from the

jungles of Brooklyn. His writing has been featured in Underwood Press, freeze frame fiction,

Crack the Spine Anthology, and Coffin Bell Journal, among others. He received his MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine and  is working on a collection of short stories and novellas titled The Stones of Riverton. The tales are inspired by the gravestones in a small town in Western Maine, and are based on the rumors of the suspicious deaths of those that lie beneath.

Clif grew up in the town of his stories and has returned there to discover more. He lives in a tiny

cabin in the woods with his dog Ollie. It's a long way from Brooklyn.