There’s an old saying: “Prose is the museum where all the old tools of poetry are kept.” In this course, we will study how to implement the tenets of poetry-writing to craft stronger, more evocative prose. These tenets include structure, story, music, imagination, brevity, and clarity (from Gregory Orr’s “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry”). We will examine the craft of prose-writing at three levels –– the word unit, the sentence unit, the paragraph unit –– in relationship to the units of poetry –– the word unit, the sentence unit, the paragraph unit. We’ll ask, “How can studying line breaks help us write more muscular, varied sentences? How can reading and writing poetry help us be more deliberate in our word choices? What can the poetic stanza teach us about paragraph pacing? “ By the end of the session, you’ll have a clearer and deeper understanding of how to implement the tools of poetry into your fiction and nonfiction. All writers welcome. Bio: Jane Huffman's poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere, and she is a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Jane is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently works for the Iowa Youth Writing Project. She is editor-in-chief of Guesthouse, an online literary journal. Twitter @janechuffman
Jane will accept manuscripts for all genres. She will also judge our poetry contest. Please see manuscript and contest guidelines on our website ocww.info for details.
We offer free student memberships at a discounted rate of $5.00 per session. You must send verification of your student status. Please contact Claudia Katz at ckatz17755@aol.com for details.
9:00-9:30 Socializing
9:30-12:00 Program
