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October 2018
The Songs of Fall: A Poetry Retreat –THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED
Instructor: Sara Robinson $99 Members | $110 Nonmembers Saturday, 10/20/18 | 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM Fall and its change of colors offers writers an opportunity to explore their writing in a natural setting. We can look at our art and see how changing colors, direction of light, plants, trees, streams, offer us opportunities to evaluate our own sense of change in what we compose. We can find inspiration like Robert Duncan’s “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a…
Find out more »January 2019
Evening Poetry: Before the Poem
Instructor: John Most $189 Members | $210 Nonmembers Tuesdays, 1/15/19 - 3/5/19 | 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM In this class, which is open to all poets, we will spend most of our time writing and workshopping new poems. In addition to writing new poems, each week we will look at what different poets do before the poem, whether it is taking notes, researching, reading, or absolutely nothing. About the Instructor: John Most earned his PhD in media philosophy from…
Find out more »February 2019
Poetry as a Personal Odyssey (This seminar is full!)
Instructor: Bill Glose $60 Members | $65 Nonmembers Saturday, 2/16/19 | 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM Following the dictum of doing what you love, this seminar will show poets how they can explore whatever theme, hobby, or territory intrigues them most to create poetry with real power. This seminar will show how to blend personal experience with historical and current events to create work that is universal. Examples of poems in early and later drafts will be used to show…
Find out more »June 2019
Evening Poetry: Keeping the Doors of our Imagination Open (This class is full!)
Instructor: Annie Kim $150 Members | $165 Nonmembers SIX Tuesdays, 6/4/19 – 7/9/19 | 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm We often make our most imaginative leaps and surprising discoveries by focusing our conscious attention outside ourselves. In this workshop we’ll invite these discoveries by engaging deeply with objects from the physical world. You'll write poems each week in dialogue with physical objects (i.e. art, everyday tools, benches in a park) and/or found texts (i.e. news, songs, historical documents, letters in…
Find out more »Rhyme (This seminar is full!)
Instructor: Neil Perry $60 Members | $65 Nonmembers DATE CHANGE: Saturday, 6/29/19 | 10:00 am – 1:30 pm This seminar will investigate the strange topic of rhyme and rhyming. At once the formal element most readily associated with poetry and the thing most poets first kick out of their tool box, rhyme has a unique and almost paradoxical place in our consideration of craft. We'll look at poems that rhyme and rhyme well. We'll look at poems that rhyme terribly. We'll…
Find out more »September 2019
Evening Poetry (This class is full!)
Instructor: Douglas Nordfors $189 Members | $210 Nonmembers Wednesdays, 9/18/19 – 11/6/19 | 6:30 pm -9:00 pm This course will follow the traditional, tried-and-true workshop model. Participants will bring in a poem each class to be critiqued by fellow students and the instructor. For anyone who appreciates outside prompts, an optional assignment will be given each week. The aim will be to create a rigorous, but stress free, atmosphere suitable for veteran as well as novice poets. Any style of…
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“Lingering in the Margins” Poetry Anthology, Reading and Q&A
The River City Poets Anthology Lingering in the Margins grew from three women’s love of poetry. Their humble idea was to offer an opportunity for fledgling poets in their community to be published. Two years and two hundred poetry submissions later, Lingering in the Margins represents the unique voice of over 50 poets, both new and experienced, woven into a tapestry of perspectives. Readings from eight contributors will be followed by a discussion of how our creative spark became published book. Co-editors Joanna Lee, Judy…
Find out more »October 2019
Villanelle Crash Course
Instructor: Claudia Gary $60 Members | $65 Nonmembers Sunday, 10/27/19 | 10:00 am - 1:00 pm Improve your villanelle skills, or write your first one. Guided by an internationally published author of villanelles, sonnets, and other metrical poems, you'll first read classic and contemporary villanelles to see why they work. The class will write a group villanelle, and then, with or without shortcuts, you’ll write one of your own. Next you'll see how your new poem can be improved by…
Find out more »February 2020
The Short Long Poem
Instructor: Christopher Kondrich $60 Members | $65 Nonmembers Saturday, 2/1/20 | 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm Long poems marvel us with their expansiveness, but many short poems seem to have this quality as well. Their brevity belies their extraordinary breadth and scope. In this seminar, we’ll explore how to harness the expansiveness of long poetry for our more concise work. We’ll consider four poems—one each by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Louise Glück, Srikanth Reddy, and Robin Coste Lewis—as examples and guides,…
Find out more »March 2020
Evening Poetry
Instructor: Douglas Nordfors $189 Members | $210 Nonmembers Wednesdays, 1/15/20 – 3/4/20 | 6:30 pm -9:00 pm This course will follow the traditional, tried-and-true workshop model. Participants will bring in a poem each class to be critiqued by fellow students and the instructor. For anyone who appreciates outside prompts, an optional assignment will be given each week. The aim will be to create a rigorous, but stress free, atmosphere suitable for veteran as well as novice poets. Any style of…
Find out more »April 2020
The speaker, and the Art of the Imaginary Real (Cancelled!)
Instructor: Derek Kannemeyer $60 Members | $65 Nonmembers Saturday, 4/4/20 | 1:00 pm – 4:30 pm Not every poem is written out of personal experience, or in the writer's own voice, or even from a point of view with which the poet agrees. As readers, we know and accept this. Poets, unlike (say) memoirists, are allowed, even expected, to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction, in their pursuit of a higher imaginative truth. As writers, do we exploit the…
Find out more »Daytime Poetry (Online course. Cancelled!)
Instructor: Mariflo Stephens $189 Members | $210 Nonmembers Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4/14/20 – 6/4/20 | 10:00 am – 11:15 am Whether you're an experienced poet who has worked in the field for years or an aspiring writer who needs direction or impetus, this class can help jump start your creative impulse. Each week we’ll experiment with a poetic technique, then write a poem to workshop the next week. In our discussions, we will focus on revision techniques, and there will…
Find out more »June 2020
Evening Poetry: Day in/Day out (Online course)
Instructor: John Most $189 Members | $210 Nonmembers Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4/14/20 – 6/4/20 | 6:30 pm – 7:45 pm In this class, open to all poets, we will spend the bulk of our time writing, reworking, and discussing new poems. We will also focus on the daily precursors of poetry: observations, notes, journals, conversations, poems, books…. Our guiding question will be how are we working into/out of a poem. John Most earned his PhD in media philosophy from the…
Find out more »What Are You Reading and What Are You Writing? (Online poetry seminar, only 1 spot left!)
Instructor: Neil Perry $60 Members | $65 Nonmembers Saturday, 6/20/20 | 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm In this moment of unsurety, of staying at home more, of reconsidering the ways we do things, many are turning to their reading for solace, for ideas or for escape. This seminar will tap into the obvious and hopefully less-obvious connections between what we read and the poetry we write. Participants will be asked to be ready to discuss at least one piece of…
Find out more »September 2020
100 Thousand Poets for Change Virtual Global Event
During this time of an unprecedented global pandemic, the arts are necessary now more than ever. WriterHouse is co-sponsoring this virtual event. To participate or attend, contact Polly Lazaron at (434) 960-3270 or pollylazaron@gmail.com.
Find out more »November 2020
Intermediate/Advanced Poetry Workshop (Online class, This class is full!)
Instructor: Erika Howsare $189 Members | $210 Nonmembers Mondays and Wednesdays, 9/21/20 – 11/11/20 | 6:00 pm – 7:15 pm NOTE: This class starts one week later than the rest This is a course for students with some experience conceiving and crafting poetic work, though you need not be published. Our focus will be on refreshing our writing practice through new sources of inspiration that help us break our writerly habits. To that end we will explore various poetic prompts, making…
Find out more »Daytime Poetry (Online class, This class is full!)
Instructor: Erika Howsare $189 Members | $210 Nonmembers Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9/15/20 – 11/12/20 | 4:00 pm – 5:15 pm The purpose of this workshop is to assist you to claim yourself as an artist/writer and to help strengthen your own unique writing voice through a series of exercises particularly designed for this, writing examples, as usual and helpful feedback from others. (If you happen to be one of few lucky ones who have never had a bad experience with writing and…
Find out more »January 2021
Daytime Poetry: Addiction, Family, and the Unrecognizable – CANCELLED
Instructor: Joanna Currey $189 Members | $210 Nonmembers Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1/12/21 – 3/4/21 | 11:00 am - 12:15 pm “I liked Hell, / I liked to go there alone” writes Marie Howe in “Magdalene: The Addict,” a line that seems to come from the psyche of a person both keenly self-aware and utterly emotionally detached. What is addiction, and who suffers from it? How does it affect a person’s life or the lives of those who love them? And…
Find out more »Explorations in Imitation: Using Poetry to Communicate the Uncommunicable (Online course)
Instructor: James Cole $189 Members | $210 Nonmembers Mondays and Thursdays, 1/11/21 – 3/4/21 | 6:30 pm – 7:45 pm The goal of poetry has always been to communicate sensation and emotion through keen deployment of sound, structure, and image. However, the concrete nature of language imposes limits on our ability to share experiences. How does one use noumena (things as they are) to convey phenomenon (things as they appear) in an effective, engaging way? How can poets produce nuance…
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