The best memoirs are more than just a good story. They have a universal significance that connects and resonates with the reader. In this memoir writing workshop, we will look to the edges of our lives for significant stories. Edges are where life adjusts, changes, teems—a marginal region that exists without borders, physical or theoretical, a place where something new might evolve out of the muck. The place of prisons and landfills, story and memoir.

We will also look closely at the craft of writers such as Terry Tempest Williams, Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, and others, and apply their techniques to our own writing. Participants will be expected to bring their own writing and share it with the group in an informal workshop setting. Writers of all levels of experience are welcome in this workshop.

When Ken Lamberton published his first book, Wilderness and Razor Wire (Mercury House, 2000), the San Francisco Chronicle called it “entirely original: an edgy, ferocious, subtly complex collection of essays…. Reading it is like chatting with someone on the street and suddenly noticing there is blood running down his side.” The book won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. He has published four books and more than a hundred articles and essays in places like the Los Angeles Times, Arizona Highways, Manoa, Puerto Del Sol, The Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000. In 2007, he won a Soros Justice Fellowship for his fourth book, Time of Grace: Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment (University of Arizona Press, 2007). Currently, he is finishing a book about hope and redemption on Arizona’s “dead” Santa Cruz River. He holds degrees in biology and creative writing from the University of Arizona.

This class, which has been designed especially for beginners, will deal with the basic craft issues of writing well-made poems. We will consider beginnings and endings, aspects of sound and imagery, structure, and how to choose the best words in the best arrangement. We will read our own poems and those of others with attention to discover what works and what doesn’t work on the page. Free-writing exercises based on the works of accomplished contemporary poets will provide the inspiration to generate new work. Careful discussions of how to revise poems will take place as well, focusing on the poem’s movement, its central tension, its pattern of thought, selection and arrangement of imagery, and tone and diction. We’ll try our hand at object poems, story poems, character studies, metaphor games, and cliché breakers.

Geraldine Connolly has been awarded two NEA fellowships and the Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. She is the author of two poetry collections, Food for the Winter (Purdue, 1990) and Province of Fire (Iris, 1998). A new book, Hand of the Wind, is forthcoming from Iris Press. Her poems and articles have appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, and The Washington Post. She served for seven years as executive editor of the literary quarterly Poet Lore and has taught at the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Chautauqua Institute in New York.

In last spring’s “Robert Frost and His Legacy,” we had such a fine time engaging Frost himself that the “legacy” found itself receiving rather short shrift. As a result, some students suggested a follow-up course so that we might explore that legacy in greater depth. This is the result, a course open to both newcomers as well as last spring’s students, wherein we will touch initially upon the high points of Frost’s concerns and stylistics before exploring in detail both his poetic influences as well as his own continuing influence in both Britain and America. From Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Robert Creeley, Seamus Heaney, Robert Hass, and beyond, we’ll trace his “plain-spoken” tradition as it has developed through the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. Please join us for an exploration that should delight both novice as well as seasoned appreciators of good poetry. A one-hour lunch break will be held at noon. Please bring a lunch with you.

Required text: Robert Frost's Poems (St. Martin's, 2002). Available at Antigone Books. If you have the book we used in class last year (Robert Frost: Selected Poems, published by Gramercy) you can use that instead.

A Westerner by inclination, John Wright has lived in the Midwest, the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, and along the western slopes of rue St. Georges in Paris and Shirdale Close in Maesycwmmer, Wales. His poems, essays, and interviews have appeared in a wide range of journals, from Mule to Chicago Review, and he has taught at an equally diverse assortment of universities, colleges, secondary schools, and art schools, both in the United States and abroad. Educated at Principia College and the University of Chicago, he currently divides his time between the canyons of southeastern Arizona and the valleys of South Wales.

In this weekend workshop, we will explore some of the celebrative modes that have come into Western culture from various sources, including the twentieth-century ode (Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver), including the amped-up roundel, rondeau, triolet, and also the catalogue as celebration (Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Nazim Hikmet, Thomas McGrath, Sylvia Plath, Donna Masini, etc.), first discussing readings and modalities, then going at it ourselves, producing/discussing drafts of three or more poems.

A one-hour lunch break will be held at noon. Please bring a lunch with you.

William Pitt Root’s poems, praised in The New York Times as “marvelous…rangy, virile, startling for their sophistication, pungency and force,” appear in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, and more. Root’s poems have been translated into 20 languages, and he has been awarded grants from Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEA, Stanford University (Stegner), and US/UK Exchange Artist programs. From 1997 to 2002, Root was Tucson’s first poet laureate. White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West is his newest collection.

Song lyrics may or may not be poems, but this is for sure: they must be sung. They must fit in the mouth. Lyrics have a remarkable relationship to clichés. They rely on them for maximum effect, yet they scream to be let free. Some of my favorite lyrics are also abstruse little affairs, yet they do the job. This workshop is all about making it work. On paper first, when the lyrics already need to swing to the eye and ear, and in someone’s mouth, second, with the physiological constraints of the voice.

During the course of the workshop we will touch on the following questions, using examples from several traditions (chanson, through French poets Aragon, Eluard, and Prévert; American folk, through Dylan, Will Oldham, and Howe Gelb; and blues and jazz standards). When are poems lyrics and lyrics poems? Which words to remember and which to forget? Do you write lyrics first or music first? Writing a good lyric is a balancing act, a challenge in compromise. By the end of the workshop, each participant will have written lyrics for a song. To conclude the workshop, we’ll bring in a guest—and a guitar—to compose a song from lyrics written by one of the workshop participants.

You do not need to know how to play or compose music to take this class. All you need is the willingness to try your hand at writing some songs.