Summer Writing Retreat 2025 “Attention and Transformation: How Poetry Helps Us Live” with Sasha West
July 8, 2025 - July 29, 2025
$269.00 – $409.00
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This Event is for Members only.
Click here to learn more about benefits of membership
Level 1: $269 for Members, $329 for Non-Members
Level 2 (includes Private Consultation): $349 for Members, $409 for Non-Members
Lucille Clifton says “Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.” In this series, we will explore poetry as an art of attention and transformation.
Expect to gather around stunning poems from writers like Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Naomi Shihab Nye, Zbigniew Herbert, and Carl Phillips. We will use these mentors to open layers of our lives to us, so we can see more deeply what the world is around us. You’ll practice some of poetry’s key techniques—voice, metaphor, form, revision—to transform your observations and experiences into meaningful, memorable language.
In addition to experimenting with a range of ways to create new poems, we’ll investigate evergreen techniques for revision so that you experience how your own writing can lead you to deeper discoveries.
Week 1 (July 8 from 6:30-9:30 PM CDT):
Tools for Carrying the Poem Across: In poems, descriptive tools help us understand our material, and they help a reader feel our words. We’ll begin with core poetic tools including: metaphor, extended metaphors, verbs as the engine of tone, and effective sensory details.
Week 2 (July 15 from 6:30-9:30 PM CDT):
The Self as a Source of Knowledge: Walt Whitman said we contain multitudes. How do we access all that we are in a poem? In this session, we’ll look at how the speaker of a poem changes what we know, think, feel, notice, and say. We’ll try out self-portraits, various voices, and persona poems to see how they lead us to different material.
Week 3 (July 22 from 6:30-9:30 PM CDT):
How Form Shapes Meaning: Even if you aren’t writing traditional forms, form determines what a poem can hold (while it still holds together). We’ll try on contemporary poems that use repetitions, lists, and litanies to convey a complex, everchanging world. We’ll study what makes stories powerful in narrative poems.
Week 4 (July 29 from 6:30-9:30 PM CDT):
Revision as a Chemical Change: How do we find more in our work than anyone can predict, even us? Using examples of how professional writers revise, we’ll practice techniques that we can use with any poems and create new exercises to use with your specific poems. You’ll leave with an abundance of ways to transform your work.
TAKE THIS CLASS IF:
- You are new to poetry.
- You’re an experienced poet looking to sharpen your craft.
- You want to explore your curiosity & imagination.
- You want to see how writing can deepen your experience of living.
- You are feeling stuck and you want your poems to do more.
Preparation for the first day of class:
No preparation required. Come ready to read and write.
Registration Details
Level 1: $269 for Members, $329 for Non-Members
Level 1 registration includes the 4-week course and access to all other 2025 Summer Writing Retreat events and activities.
Level 2: $349 for Members, $409 for Non-Members
Level 2 registration includes the 4-week course, access to all other 2025 Summer Writing Retreat events and activities, PLUS a 20-minute one-on-one Zoom consultation with instructor Sasha West. You may share up to and no more than 10 pages of your work ahead of the meeting for feedback, but that is optional and not required for the meeting. For those planning to submit work for instructor feedback, please note that AI-generated material will not be accepted. You must be the sole author of your work. For more information on AI and author guidelines and best practices, please refer to the Author’s Guild.
You may register online, or download the mail-in registration form here.
The deadline to register for this course is Tuesday, July 8 at 5:00 PM CDT.
Instructor
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Sasha West is the author of How to Abandon Ship, finalist for the 2025 Kingsley Tufts and winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Burdine C. Johnson Best Book of Poetry Award. Her first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, was a National Poetry Series selection and received a Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including: American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Georgia Review, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, and Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency. As eco-arts collaborative Hammonds + West, her multi-media shows with visual artist Hollis Hammonds have been exhibited at the Columbus College of Art and Design, Texas A&M, ArtPrize Michigan, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at St. Edward’s University in Austin, where she founded the Environmental Humanities program.
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