Writers Workshop: Mapping Lives and Discovering Connections with Sean Hill

Thursday, June 26 from 11:00 AM till 12:30PM at Watermark Art Center with with poet and author Sean Hill
No fee to attend, but pre-registration is required as space is limited. Contact Leah Grunzke at lgrunzke@watermarkartcenter.org

Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, and the forthcoming collection, The Negroes Send Their Love. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, The Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, and numerous other journals, and in several anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana. More about Sean Hill →

Mapping Lives and Discovering Connections

How are we voices for wildness? How does the way we are seen in the places we call home affect how we write about place? Can we re-see through defamiliarization? How do the tools of the craft of poetry teach us how to connect with wildness—both ours and that which is outside of us?

In this writing class, we will map our lives and explore the connections we can build with poetry—nudging words to find their place in syntax, marrying disparates with metaphor, stringing images and thoughts in patterns of ideation and emotion, connecting others to our words—to illuminate connections with the non-human world. We’ll discuss poems selected from A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia and Cascadia Field Guide: Art | Ecology | Poetry to guide this exploration.

Come prepared to generate ideas and share work written during our time together. Our goals will be finding connections, furthering exploration, spurring generation, and creating the makings of a draft of a new poem.

Pre-registration is required as space is limited. Contact Leah Grunzke at lgrunzke@watermarkartcenter.org