Friends,
This summer I have the wonderful opportunity to teach a week-long, in-person class on collage poetry at Shakerag Workshops in Sewanee, TN. In my session, we will explore how to use visual imagery to inspire & inform creative writing and vice versa. We will do this the old-fashioned (fun!) way, with scissors & glue and paper & pen(cil)! Beginners are most definitely welcome, along with practitioners of either discipline.
The workshop will ask: What images draw your eye? What colors? What themes? Beginning there, we will scour paper sources (magazines, maps, old stamps, junk mail, ancient yearbooks, etc.) to build image libraries, which will become the material of our paper collages. These works will be powered by instinct & intuition. Want to see an example? Here’s a collage I built a while back. Tupelo Quarterly published the collage and the poem it inspired. You can read the poem here (you’ll have to copy the PDF link at the bottom into your browser).
Can you guess what images I was obessed with when I created this?
In our workshop, we will reverse the process and work from words to images, and finally, we will explore what happens when we blend images and words to create hybrid work. This is the area I’ve been working in most recently. Some call them visual poems, some call them poetry comics, some call them collage poetry. Whatever we call them, they are loads of fun to create.
Here are some excerpts of recent hybrid works. Fun fact: for these, the complete works will be on display and for sale at the Shakerag gallery this summer.
Come create with me!
What: Words Driven by Images: Paper Collage and Creative Writing
Where: Shakerag Workshop, Sewanee, TN
When: June 14-20
Info: Click here
