On Saturday, August 15, from 3–5 PM ET, I’ll be teaching a virtual workshop with The Notebooks Collective called The Shape of Attention: Exploring Form in Poetry and Prose.
This workshop grows out of a question I keep returning to in my own writing and teaching: What happens when we change the shape of a piece?
Sometimes, a draft stalls because of the shape we have asked the subject to live inside. A memory may not want to become a straight narrative. An image may need the pressure of a list. A question may need to remain a question. A fragment may be asking for other fragments beside it. A block of prose may create a kind of momentum that line breaks would interrupt; a poem’s white space may allow silence to do some of the thinking.
In this two-hour generative workshop, we’ll explore form as a practical and imaginative tool for writers of poetry, prose, and hybrid work. Rather than treating form as a rule to obey or a test of mastery, we’ll approach it as a way to direct attention, create pressure, interrupt habit, and invite surprise.
We’ll think together about four possible ways form works:
Form as container: What pressure does this shape create?
Form as movement: How does this shape move the mind from one line, sentence, section, image, or thought to the next?
Form as permission: What does this shape allow me to say that I might not otherwise say?
Form as interruption: What habit does this shape disrupt?
Participants will move through a series of low-pressure writing exercises designed to generate new material and offer fresh ways into existing drafts. We’ll work with forms such as lists, address, questions, fragments, blocks of prose, braids, and sequences, asking: “What does this form make possible?”
Writers are invited to bring a short draft, fragment, image, object, or memory they’d like to write from, though no prior preparation is required. Something to write with or on is enough.
This workshop is open to poets, prose writers, hybrid writers, and anyone curious about how structure can help us think, feel, remember, and discover.
Registration is available through The Notebooks Collective.
The Influence 