Weekend Poetry Workshop (6 hours; two days; includes snacks)

Whether you need motivation to write, want to polish your writing before an agent sees it, receive one-on-one feedback on your first draft, or get guidance on furthering your writing career the Baltic’s consultants are here to provide support and structure for personal and writerly growth.

In a weekend workshop, writers have two days to dig into a broader element of craft, through generative
exercises and on-the-spot feedback sessions. Want to learn how to pitch an agent, master the fractured narrative, or better approaches to transforming a draft into a finished poem? These three-hour
sessions hone in on a single aspect of the writing process or the writing life.

Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press), A Model of City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and is the recipient of a PSA Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Emerging Writers Award. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. He founded and publishes Action, Spectacle.

Our goal is to offer support, motivation and inspiration while deepening your sense of a writing community, whether you write poetry, memoir, essay, or fiction, whether you are just coming to writing or you have projects underway. If your goal is to write engaging poems and prose, and perhaps that those writings might find readers in journals and books, then an academic degree isn’t necessary. Writing is a craft rather than a science. Practice and apprenticeship make it flourish.

Accomplished writers and teachers will provide guided exercises and prompts, expert instruction, help in developing your individual works and projects, help you stay on track, and aid you in answering questions about your writing and the publishing. During our hours together there will be productive accidents, discoveries, surprises.

These workshops and consultations are affordable offer up the skills, guidance, attention and professional nurturing that will help you expand your own writing skills and interests, deepen your knowledge of the publishing process, refine your already existing drafts and manuscripts, and help you get those poems and prose out into the world where they can be experienced by an audience of readers.

We will do this by way of unique writing and revision exercises, encountering writing in translation, cross-genre experimentation, discussions of journal and book publication, obtaining an agent, crafting cover letters and query letters, reading works by an array of writers in a variety of styles, and more. .All levels and stylistic interests are welcome: young and old, narrative and conceptual, beginners and experienced writers.

We will enrich our craft by reading and examining the techniques and content of both conventional and innovative published writer. Unique to the Baltic Writing Community, there will be some shared texts, but you will also be assigned some texts specific to your needs and interests. These readings will aid in perfecting voice and tone, dialogue, exposition, imagery, flow and pace, narration, character development, plot, narrative
and setting, and more.

Our teachers have decades of collective teaching experience in some of the most highly regarded writing programs, publish with some of the most prestigious presses and literary journals, and have won countless fellowships, grants and residencies. Most importantly, they are fantastic at providing encouragement, a safe environment, and supportive suggestions for writerly change.

*Full refunds available up until 14 days before the start date of the workshop; after that, your registration may be used for a seat in a future workshop or you may always transfer your seat to a friend..

Question? Contact the Baltic at balticresidency@gmail.com