1 Session: Saturday, October 24
1:00-3:00pm ET
Craig Morgan Teicher

This class will be taught by Craig Morgan Teicher, author of Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA, 2010) and five books of poems—August, September, October (BOA, 2026); Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), which won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (CLP, 2007), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry. His collection of essays, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress, was published by Graywolf in 2018.

The poet Richard Howard had a wonderful maxim that has always helped me understand the difference between prose and poetry: “Verse reverses, prose proceeds.” What do we do when we get to the end of a poem? Read it again, because the last words shoot a bolt of electricity up through the poem, altering the meanings of all the words that came before—this is verse reversing. Prose, however, without line breaks and with only paragraphs to guide our eyes, proceeds: it wants to tell us what happens next, to wind its way down page after page.

But sometimes prose reverses. When it does, we get some of literature’s most exciting and enduring forms: fables, prose poems, and, more recently, flash fiction, which encourage imagination and whimsy as they push against the boundaries that hold distinct kinds of writing in place. In this one day craft seminar, students will discuss short pieces by a number of exemplary writers—Franz Kafka, Ross Gay, Lydia Davis, Rita Dove, and Russell Edson, among others—and experiment with generative exercises to write their own short-form pieces. Writers of both prose and poetry are welcome and encouraged to attend.

Students Will:

• Familiarize themselves with forms that straddle prose and poetry

• Explore how these forms draw on other kinds of writing—journalism, instructions, reports

• Experiment with writing prompts and in-class exercises

This class has 1 full scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Wednesday, October 14.