Critique, response, cohort 🌩️ / lyric threads lab: week 1
On creating a container for writers to share thoughts in the workshop format + a writing prompt at the bottom
Follow along for the next 7 weeks as the first lyric threads lab discusses, writes, examines, and de-constellates lyric poetry and lyric essays. We will practice writing in new ways. We will offer transformative responses to one another in an intimate container. Here, on Substack, I (the guide, the host, the gardener) will detail what we discuss for you and share our generative writing activities.
🌩️ lyric threads lab [the cloud cohort] 🌩️ Week One:
Introductions, Structure, and Gardening of the Workshop Environment
This weekend begins the first cohort of the lyric threads lab — an intimate generative writing and feedback workshop... laboratory… labyrinth. My desire is to make the space I wish I had before I moved across the country for my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program1.
Before the two year MFA program at Eastern Washington University, I was mostly a solitary poet with the seldom writing groups that met in cafes, exhilarating as they were. We generated poems and plays with our guts. For a while in 2019, a small group of us performers, poets, playwrights, directors, and otherwise expressively creative people met weekly on Mondays to play around with theatre games and chance-based writing prompts. We called ourselves the Elsewhere People, but that would soon pause for many reasons including the pandemic.
And, too, in a much more casual way, my dear friend and poet Bethany Price would invite people to cafes to write. She’d offer a prompt or goal (like making me write a sestina which caused great drama in my body—screaming and squirming—ultimately with good outcome, ha!), and we’d all share what we had with no expectation of brilliance though brilliance would often be the result. These impromptu cafe moments were how I met so many of the people I’ve loved (to read and to be friends with).
I was aware of how lucky I was to be able to participate in and create these small groups of incredible minds and hearts, but I was still craving the more Saturnian element that an MFA cohort offers: a group of people all studying together, offering thoughts for improvement, or influencing each other with writers and concepts that I wasn’t exposed to yet.
I wanted to go deeper.
I wanted to develop my craft.
But I eventually didn’t have a recommendable workshop experience. In fact, my workshop experience sounds to be both typically unhelpful and also atypically hostile. [This is not to disregard the invaluable elements of my MFA — mostly, meeting people who would expose me to what I needed to know. Hello, Erica Bower who gifted me the concept of a lyric essay!]
In my last year in the program, I was assigned to lead an undergraduate writing workshop. I had two quarters to prepare for this, and spent most of my time interviewing people who led workshops in “alternative ways.” And, I read books on leading anti-racist workshops and many essays on Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. I contemplated adapting the workshop format to include somatic or emotionally regulating rituals. And, my advisor Laura Read led my final graduate workshop with the “Workshop Menu” offered by Maya Jewell Zeller and Kathryn Nuernberger’s textbook Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology.
And, while I implemented most of these approaches in my undergraduate workshop, what felt most important to me is how it feels to garden. And I say this as a first-time-ever-gardener. I thought back to how my graduate workshops felt: festering animosity between people suffering from severe self doubt, open hostility as a couple “mean girls” targeted a new “enemy” each week, and other dynamics that could have been cured with caring diligence. I was surprised that a group of one of the most sensitive populations (come on, we’re poets!) would conduct themselves with claws, from their harshest shadows. I wanted more aggressive pruning of these interactions. I wanted the room to feel safe enough to feel like I could share my most experimental or strange writing.
And I needed my strange writing to bloom — though I found other venues for that eventually.
I sensed that a healthy and expansive workshop requires a workshop leader who clearly sets the tone and offers a structure, lovingly corrects any moments of violence (towards oneself or another) early on, and reminds the participants of the purpose of the workshop.
What I felt with my undergraduate writers was a sense of conscientious, silly, and encouraging community. Of course, I may not have been aware of any animosity by the nature of my position, but I saw genuine desire to improve one’s own writing by one’s own standards and a group of people willing to put in the difficult work of close readership and response.
The Workshopping Approach
I approach this 🌩️ lyric threads lab 🌩️ as a balance between two very difficult desirable outcomes.
The first being: creating a space open enough to be wild enough to be lit on fire enough to result in exciting new writing. This outcome requires form and gentleness. Wide open love and kindness but also a hawk like focus. The participants must feel allowed to risk — to fail — to look silly — to “mess up.”
The second difficult desirable outcome is to foster a community of critical (not harsh!) thinking. By critical thinking I mean: this community must feel encouraged to respond with their unique lens. They all must feel able to read closely and find inside the writing its possibilities. They must be given the space to ask questions and push back on their own biases and foundational notions. This requires a skill that is often taught to us in patriarchal ways: sorting, describing, instructing, improving. Critique often squashes out the freedom to experiment, but critical thinking and response is integral to fresh growth.
I can trust this cohort of writers and artists to balance these, I am certain, as long as we all are clear on the forms and structures. If you’re curious on this cohort’s workshop menu, here’s a link to the Notion page ;)
I believe offering a menu of all the types of feedback styles allows the writer to choose how their work is handled. I do hope the writers choose some of the “Out There” options like the Transliteration / Translation Experiment, but I trust the writer will know what they need best.
I intend to be an excellent gardener. In actuality, and in this writing cohort. This year, only the dill is harvestable because I started too late in the season. But I did get the satisfaction of watching the watermelon plant grow lush and wide. I see the sunflower stalks shoot up. I water and weed, and add marigolds to protect from pests in humane ways.
I look forward to seeing how this cohort grows and changes and creates, and dedicate myself to the healthful cultivation of this group — a group I wish I had before, during, and after my MFA experience.
We will assume positive intent. We will ask questions. We will feel free to respond with our full selves.
Why “lab”? — the laboratory, the labyrinth
When designing the lyric threads lab, I wanted to make sure the title was built on the idea of experimentation. And so the word “lab” as in “laboratory” was more accurate than workshop or course or class. To me, a laboratory is more democratic and more open to possibility. I was less interested in lecturing and more excited to create an environment for writers to play with the pulleys and levers of language.
The other source of the word “lab” for me is the “labyrinth” — a maze where you can’t get lost. When you enter, you commit to walking the predetermined path but also you submit to the chance of a new thought occurring, or the path presenting a new way of seeing what you’ve already experienced (as in a poem or a film or language your subconscious mind wanted you to include). There’s a safety in the form but there’s also that tinge of discomfort the burbles up when you’re on a path you find familiar — the idea you’ve put off that now has the space to work itself out with you.
For me, the analogy of the labyrinth is a comfort when I’m working in a long form project — especially when it’s feeling endless and I’m not feeling the surge of energy to forge ahead. I remind myself that I committed to the path and I must keep going. I committed to the path of inner change through writing, and I will know when I’ve found my exit.
I imagine a writing cohort being similar to this commitment. And, in the 🌩️ lyric threads lab 🌩️ example, the writers have committed to 7 weeks in intimate container with others.
Why "“lyric”? — the lyric mode
I wrote about the lyric mode in this post a few weeks ago:
Of all the modes of writing, I chose the lyric mode of writing as an “organizing principle.” The lyric mode is where the speaker’s inner voice takes center stage. It aims to create a personal and emotional connection. It’s full of imagery and figurative language.
I am interested in how lyrical language permeates theatre, film, poetry, essays, and memoir. It’s lyric language that pulls at me, and I’m sure many other writers. When designing a writing lab, it’s important to express who the lab is for, and who it is not for.
And I am notoriously genre agnostic — but all my writing projects rely on the lyrical approach. And all the writing I love the most thrums along with the lyric mode.
Why “the cloud cohort”?
Shape, form, evaporation
Throughout the lyric threads lab, we will pay attention to the shape and form of a piece of writing. We will notice how the shape of a piece of writing increases tangibility. Or, maybe the shape lends to more immediate connection with the heart of the poem. Maybe the shape of a poem is so apparent that it begins to evaporate the closer one sinks into it?
I’m thinking of Victoria Chang’s OBIT poems as the form of an obituary of items, moments, or body parts that wouldn’t in “normal” life have obituaries written about them. The form of the obituary is the outline and the subject within it dissolves its lines as we read along.
And so the cohort’s name is [the cloud cohort] because clouds are migratory lakes2 — like poems are always changing shape and the process of writing one feels like evaporation… or maybe sublimation… And I believe the most enjoyable poems are the ones that feel simultaneously shapely and ephemeral.
It’s less about the state it is in, and more about the process it is taking.
Would you like to join in from afar?
Over the next 7 weeks, I’ll be letting you in on what we discuss and what we attempt. You can follow along with the generative writing prompts, and share what you write in the comments.
And be sure to tell us what kind of response you’d like to your writing (using the workshop menu or not!).
For our first week, we’re reading Katie Peterson’s A Piece of Good News and discussing her lyrical threads.
Today’s Generative Writing Prompt:
Step One: Create a Work Bank — language that you found exciting or interesting while reading the various sources of words throughout your day.
Step Two: Write a poem or lyric essay in the “shape” of one of Katie Peterson’s poems that:
- utilizes many or all of the words from your word bank
- and acts as an introduction of yourself to the world (or, maybe, a smaller audience)
- and/or describes your September 8th this year versus other years of your life
- or… all of these prompts combined ;)
Recent news / what I’m looking forward to:
For Wisconsin folks: Planetary Elegies — September 14, 2024 (IN PERSON) - 1:00pm - 3:30pm — at Lynden Sculpture Garden. In this workshop, we will read and write elegies – the poetic form for reflection and lamentation of the dead and the dying. These elegies will often focus on our planet and will just as often celebrate and grieve our brief lives on our planet. Part climate grief circle, part creative development, this workshop is a container to feel deeply and to find language for what might be difficult to express.
Our workshop will begin in Artist-in-Residence
‘s labyrinth. We begin with gentle movement through the path of the labyrinth made in the prairie on Lynden Sculpture Garden’s property. Then, the participants will be welcomed into the second floor art studio for the remaining time.
- ’s new biography about Sanora Babb is about to hit the shelves! Pre-order here to help a beloved writer with her pre-sales (which are SO IMPORTANT for the life of a book). Also you’re going to want to subscribe to her glorious substack.
My first ever video poem was published by TriQuarterly this summer: predictive text. I wrote this poem in a flurry, and recorded / edited the video version so quickly, too (with the help of Tori Thurmond and Marty Kaszubowski). I’m so happy to have it up online :)
My birthday is September 23 — sometimes the first day of fall, sometimes the second day of fall, sometimes I just love that I was born when the “thunder ceases.” I’m so looking forward to wearing light layers and making cyanotype prints with some of my closest friends in the sun. I want to memorialize my first time growing dill in these prints and also I’m on the hunt for mesh-y things like this:
Cyanotype print by Megan Koth
I am eternally grateful for this experience, which is why I want to look at its cracks. How could the environment have been better for the students and the instructors? Moving to Spokane for an academic program introduced me to worlds I would not have known without. One of these worlds included mystical medieval literature written by woman, the texts the broke my skull open. But more on that later… maybe this winter I’ll start talking about my Next Big Project?
This “clouds are migratory lakes” comes from Rachel Cusk’s “Second Place,” a novel I just emerged from, fully taken by her language and scenes.
What a gift it was to be inside of today’s first call! I am so inspired by all the different possibilities for processing feedback and sharing writing! Let the magic winding labyrinth walk begin!