with Kate Gray
 
In four sessions, honor your tender and fierce heart. Add tools to your poetry toolkit by investigating different types of poems. You’ll start with narrative, poems that tell stories. Then, you’ll explore lyric poems, which are slices, distillations, flashes. We’ll move into a few forms: one week we’ll dive into elegies, and the final week we’ll write persona poems, which offer the poet the use of other voices or masks. No experience necessary. None of these require rhyme. You'll generate new writing, share your work in an intensely positive environment using the Gateless Method, apply insights you'll learn, read great examples, and laugh. Guaranteed to open up your options. One hour will be devoted to each session’s tool, and the second hour you’ll practice and apply it. This workshop will give you practical ways to distinguish poetry from other forms, hands-on experience, and the light to show you how brilliantly you shine.
 
This class is ideal for people who:
 
want concrete proof that poetry is different from other genres
want to dive more deeply into the craft of poetry
like to learn the tools of the trade
 
You can expect to walk away with:
at least 4 new drafts
a community of poets who encourage and take risks
tools to enhance the meaning in your poems
a sore belly from laughing together and enjoying the process of applying new skills
 
______________________
 
WHERE:
Online via ZOOM
(link will be sent one week prior to the 1st class)
DATES:
4 Thursdays
February 1, 8, 15, off, 29
TIME
6 to 8pm EST
______________________
LIMITED TO 7 STUDENTS
 
 
About the Instructor...
Kate Gray's passion stems from writing, teaching, and volunteering. For Every Girl: New & Selected Poems was published by Widow & Orphan House in 2019. Her first full-length book of poems, Another Sunset We Survive (Cedar House Books, 2007) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and followed chapbooks, Bone-Knowing (2006), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize and Where She Goes (2000), winner of the Blue Light Chapbook Prize. Kate’s first novel, Carry the Sky, (Forest Avenue, 2014) stares at bullying without blinking. Her poetry and essays have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. In her novel-in-progress, she narrates, in Sylvia Plath’s voice, what led to The Bell Jar and her suicide attempt in 1953. Over the years she’s been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, Norcroft, Soapstone, and Storyknife, and a fellowship from the Oregon Literary Arts. After 25 years teaching English at a community college, she retired to coach writers. Kate and her partner live in a pine-and-oak forest in the mid-Columbia River Gorge with two impetuous dogs.