get inspired!

It’s time again for the Two Sylvias Press Online Poetry Retreat: four weeks of new prompts, writing exercises, inspiration and critiques offered by the editors of Two Sylvias Press (Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy).

There are two sessions: June 26 – July 23 (July session) and July 31 – August 27 (August session). Find all the details and registration information on the Two Sylvias Press Online Poetry Retreat page.

haiku haiku

If haiku is on your radar, here are two bits of information from Haiku Northwest (via Michael Dylan Welch) that might interest you:

• The thirteenth annual Porad Haiku Award is accepting haiku submissions for just one more week. The deadline is Thursday, September 15, 2016. The 2016 judge is Charles Trumbull, former president of the Haiku Society of America and editor emeritus of Modern Haiku magazine.
• The Seabeck Haiku Getaway 2016 doesn’t take place until October 27–30, but you can save money by registering now. Early registration ends on Friday, September 23.

Follow the links for additional details on each of these haiku opportunities.

cap your summer

Whether it’s the finale of your summer or the launch of your fall poetry season, LiTFUSE is a great way to juice up your year. Each September, the small town of Tieton, Washington — “Mighty Tieton” to those who love it — welcomes a lively throng of poets for a weekend of workshops, readings, exhibits and conversations. The atmosphere is welcoming and congenial, casual and stimulating.

This is LiTFUSE 10 and celebrations will include the official launch of POETS UNiTE! The LiTFUSE @10 Anthology (Cave Moon Press), now available for pre-order. See the complete LiTFUSE lineup and find registration information at LiTFUSE 2016.

another summer treat….times two!

We recently featured a rather hefty list of upcoming summer festivals and retreats in the Cascadia region. In case that wasn’t enough to get your poetic juices flowing — or in case you expect to spend your summer at your desk — here’s one more option.

Two Sylvias Press is offering two Online Poetry Retreats — June 27 – July 22, 2016 and August 1 – August 26, 2016. Participating poets will receive prompts, inspiration, a book and critiques by cofounders and editors of Two Sylvias Press, Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy. Read more about the retreats and sign up on the Two Sylvias website.

looking ahead to summer…

Soon — very soon! — the days will start getting longer, and while there’s plenty of winter ahead, it’s not too soon to dream of summer escapes. The summer of 2016 will bring two dazzling poetry workshop/retreats to Annie’s Acre in Nanoose Bay, on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island.

June 3-5, Ellen Bass will offer “The World Split Open” and August 5-7, Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar will offer “The Hidden Architecture of the Poem.” Enrollment is limited. For details on the workshops and accommodations, contact Tina Biello: tbiello@shaw.ca.

reading art

We’ve mentioned Poets on the Coast: a Writing Retreat for Women before. Participants join Kelli Russell Agodon and Susan Rich for sessions on creativity, generating work, publication, a Master Class workshop, and one-on-one mentoring. This year’s retreat included a visit to the Museum of Northwest Art (MoNA), in La Conner, where participants wrote poems inspired by the paintings, photographs, mixed media pieces and installations on exhibit. The resulting poems are now posted on the MoNA site.

Poets on the Coast 2016 has already been scheduled and registration is open! Space is very limited. Sign up now and watch for updates on Facebook.

First chance…limited opportunity!

This is an early notice of an opportunity that will not last. In June 2016, the poet Ellen Bass will be the instructor for a weekend poetry retreat, “The World Split Open,” in Nanoose Bay (Vancouver Island), BC, Canada.

In 1968 the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”

“This weekend in June all of us — men and women — will journey into that world of truth-telling. But it isn’t so easy to tell the truth. Not only do we need courage, but we need craft. As another great writer, Willa Cather, said, ‘Only the artist . . . knows how difficult it is.’ And so we will study the craft together, reading model poems by contemporary poets and discussing central topics, such as the concept of discovery, image and metaphor, sentiment and sentimentality, and the power of sensory detail. We will engage our greatest resources — attention, precision, imagination — to bring our own new poems into being. We’ll strive for language that is accurate, fresh, and alive and we’ll learn strategies to help us write poems whose form, music, rhythm, diction, and meaning work together as an powerful whole.

“With the inspiration of this gathering, expect to surprise yourself in making poems that are more vivid, more true, more beautiful and complex than you’ve ever written before. Both experienced and beginning poets are welcome, as are teachers of poetry.”

The workshop will be held June 3-5, 2016 and is limited to 20 participants. There is camping onsite and other accommodations nearby. Cost: $550 CDN includes tuition and meals. Register with Tina at tbiello@shaw.ca.

(In a related note, Ellen Bass will offer a WordWorks talk on Controlled Chaos on September 23, 2015, and a master class the following day, both at Hugo House in Seattle. September 25-27 she will be the featured poet at LiTFUSE 2015.)
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photo of Ellen Bass by Irene Young