Tupelo Quarterly is pleased to announce the launch of our educational component!
Prose Poetry with Emma O’Leary & Tiffany Troy
September 3rd from 7:30pm to 9pm E.T. via ZOOM
Workshop Duration: 90 minutes
What makes a prose poem a poem? By disavowing stanzas, prose poetry offers an exciting alternative to traditional lyric poetry, creating a field of concentrated energy. In this interactive cross-genre workshop, we will look at prose poems and examine how the sonic quality of poetry is in fact not lost–but amplified–through assonance, rhymes, and rhythm. Prose poems allow for the uncanny through a buildup of images and metaphors. We will delve into creative writing exercises and write our own prose poems.
Meet Your Instructors
Emma O’Leary is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, where she taught a course on Ekphrasis and volunteered with the Incarcerated Writers Initiative. While completing her graduate thesis, she taught English Language Arts in Brooklyn & Queens. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, and she currently teaches writing and works in independent film. She is at work on her debut novel.
Tiffany Troy is a critic, translator, and poet. Her reviews and interviews are published or forthcoming in Adroit Journal, EcoTheo Review, Heavy Feather Review, Los Angeles Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, where she serves as an associate editor.
Register here!
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Writing the Strange and the Surreal: A Generative Poetry Workshop with Prompts by Jose Hernandez Diaz
September 17th from 7AM to 8:30 E.T. via ZOOM
Workshop Duration: 90 minutes
In this class, we will look at contemporary poets writing the strange and the surreal, such as Ray Gonzalez, Marosa di Giorgio, Eduardo C. Corral, James Tate, and others. What is gained from writing the surreal? What is discovered along the way? Next, guided by our instructor’s surreal prompts on dreams, nightmares, aliens, space, etc., we will write our own poems and prose poems and submit them to literary journals.
Meet Your Instructor
Jose Hernandez Diaz is the author of the chapbook of prose poems, The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). He has been awarded a fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, and he lives in southern California.
Register here!
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Feature Writing with Erica Buist
Saturday September 24th at 10 – 11:30 AM ET via ZOOM
Workshop Duration: 90 minutes
How does a feature differ from a memoir piece or a news article? How is it researched, structured and written? In this workshop we’ll go through the fundamentals of feature writing, from pitching to filing. We’ll take a behind-the-scenes look at the preparation involved, and the nuts and bolts of how a feature is stitched together from scraps of facts, data, observation and interviews, and made gorgeous in the writing of it.
Meet Your Instructor
Erica Buist is a writer, journalist and lecturer based in London, England. She has written features for the Guardian, BBC and Newsweek, and also teaches journalism with Guardian Masterclasses, Goldsmiths University and Oxbridge Academic Programs. She is the author of the book This Party’s Dead in which she travels to seven death festivals all over the world, and also writes plays as part of Stockroom Theatre Company’s writers room. She can be found on Twitter @ericabuist and Instagram @thispartysdead.
Register here!
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Interviewing with Erica Buist
Saturday October 1st 10 – 11:30 AM ET via ZOOM
Workshop Duration: 90 Minutes
While the best interviewers make it look like a friendly chat with a fascinating person, there is so much more going on behind the scenes. What questions should you ask an interviewee? How do you listen and think ahead in the interview at the same time? What do you do with an interviewee who wanders off on tangents, or gives one-word answers? Why are interviewees sometimes reticent, and how do you get them to open up? What is acceptable and not acceptable when it comes to editing someone’s words down into a workable quote? Where do you even find the people with the stories you want to hear? And how do you integrate their answers within the flow of your writing? All these questions will be answered and more in this workshop on the art of the interview.
Meet Your Instructor
Erica Buist is a writer, journalist and lecturer based in London, England. She has written features for the Guardian, BBC and Newsweek, and also teaches journalism with Guardian Masterclasses, Goldsmiths University and Oxbridge Academic Programs. She is the author of the book This Party’s Dead in which she travels to seven death festivals all over the world, and also writes plays as part of Stockroom Theatre Company’s writers room. She can be found on Twitter @ericabuist and Instagram @thispartysdead.
Register here!
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Poetic Erasure with Leigh Sugar
Saturday October 8th 2 – 3:30 PM ET via ZOOM
Workshop Duration: 90 minutes
In this workshop on poetic erasure, we will come together as readers and writers to look at several examples of contemporary erasure works, move through exercises, and ultimately begin our own erasure poems/projects. We will begin by forming a general understanding of what erasure could be, where/how erasure exists in the context of contemporary poetry, and brainstorm why erasure is a relevant form given our current national and international sociopolitical landscape. We will then become familiar with several contemporary erasure works and artists, and start to notice various options when creating “rules” for an erasure project. Here, we emphasize the relationship between source text, form, process, and resulting erasure. Practice exercises will provide introductory methods for beginning an erasure finding ways “in” to a source text. Workshop will conclude with optional group sharing and suggestions for next steps.
Meet Your Instructor
Leigh Sugar is a disabled & chronically ill Michigan-born, Brooklyn-based writer, editor, educator, and movement artist. Her varied professional activities include teaching undergraduate creative writing at New York University and the Institute for Justice and Opportunity, performing in durational dance installations, and editing anthologies by incarcerated writers.
Register here!
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