Dear Writers,

Paige's poetry class was so successful we decided to open a few more like it, taught in the same vein. This weekend you can sign up for Crafting Great Metaphors -- a great cross-genre workshop, important to any genre. She'll also be teaching a workshop on the poetic line, and another on the lesser known figurative languages. 

Fiction writers (and prose poetry lovers, I bet) shouldn't miss out on Rosario Margate's Flash Fiction class held next weekend. She's brilliant, talented, and strange in all the perfect ways for a workshop. If you need to shake up your quarantine, you can't go wrong with this. 

In early May, we also have studio favorite Lauren Berry returning to teach a themed open genere writing class on mothers. Just in time for Mother's Day. 

We are also planning classes with Allyn West and Martha Serpas, so stay tuned.

Email me if you do want to take one of these but are worried because you need a discount different from the one below, or if you need a lesson in how to use Zoom (http://zoom.us) for our online, realtime classes. There's more on Zoom below the class descriptions.

Discounts are available for these workshops: ee for 10 percent off, ada for 15 percent off, and ocean for 20 percent off discounts. 

With love,

Miah

The Poet's Workshop $360

An Eye for Resemblances: Crafting Great Metaphors

2 Weekend Mornings
with Paige Quiñones 
April 18,19
from 10 to 1
(installments/discounts offered)

The English language is saturated with metaphor. In everyday conversation we might say we woke at the crack of dawn, the birds were singing, and your smile lit up the room. A mastery of metaphor is a crucial step toward writing great poetry. How can we wake dead metaphors in our poems to make each line shimmer? Can we reanimate clichés? In this generative workshop we will look at metaphorical poetry from writers like Sharon Olds, Tomaż Šalamun, Anne Sexton, Nick Flynn, Jennifer Givhan, Sandra Lim, Natalie Diaz, Carl Phillips, and others to examine how they inhabit the figurative world and how we too can enter its halls.

Paige Quiñones is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston, where she is the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Previously a fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies at UH, she received her MFA in poetry from the Ohio State University. Her work has twice been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Hayden's Ferry Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Her book The Best Prey was selected by Tiana Clark for Pleides Press as the winner of the 2020 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, and will be published in 2021. 

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Feeling a Musical Line: Enjambment in All Its Forms

2 Weekend Mornings
with Paige Quiñones 
May 30, 31
from 10 to 1
(installments/discounts offered)

Robert Hass said that when a poem is alive in its sound, the line is a proposal about listening. In this generative workshop, we will play with the musicality of the line from a single syllable onward. How can we manipulate and incorporate silence into our lines? We’ll take a look at poems from Lucille Clifton, Kim Addonizio, William Carlos Williams, C.D. Wright, Sylvia Plath, and others to feel out how music informs their lines. Participants will leave this workshop with multiple drafts of poems of varying musical style.

Paige Quiñones is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston, where she is the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Previously a fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies at UH, she received her MFA in poetry from the Ohio State University. Her work has twice been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Hayden's Ferry Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Her book The Best Prey was selected by Tiana Clark for Pleides Press as the winner of the 2020 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, and will be published in 2021. 

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Hello

Redefining Construction: Syntax and Grammatical Structure

2 Weekend Mornings
with Paige Quiñones 
June 6,7
from 10 to 1
(installments/discounts offered)

Alliteration, hyperbole, personification, paradox, synecdoche—we’re familiar with many useful rhetorical terms in poetry. How about zeugma, anacoluthon, prolepsis, or chiasmus? This generative workshop will serve to expand our working definitions of the tools of the trade and chart how both canonical and living writers use rhetorical techniques in the building blocks of their poems. Participants will leave this workshop with a deeper understanding of syntactical structures and more definitions in their poetry toolbox.

Paige Quiñones is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston, where she is the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Previously a fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies at UH, she received her MFA in poetry from the Ohio State University. Her work has twice been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Hayden's Ferry Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Her book The Best Prey was selected by Tiana Clark for Pleides Press as the winner of the 2020 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, and will be published in 2021. 

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The Poet's Workshop $360

Bolt: a Flash Fiction Workshop

2 Weekend Mornings
with Rosario Margate
April 25,26
from 10 to 1
(installment plans/discounts)

One might think that the form of flash fiction does not merit much attention in either its reading or writing. A bolt can strike, fasten, unroll. To bolt can mean to transport urgently or make a quick flight.This workshop will explore the gift of attention that flash can bring, what might draw a person to flash (as both/and reader and writer), and how flash can enrich vision and re-vision in one’s writing practice.  Reading will include very short works by Jean Toomer, Tina May Hall, Sofia Samatar, Gwendolyn Paradice, Sejal Shah, Melissa Goodrich, Rahawa Haile, and others. We will discuss how one can briefly but clearly sketch a grounded world, what weight an image might carry (or take down), choosing the most necessary and impactful details, and ways to build layered, textured prose, sentence by sentence..

Rosario Margate is the recipient of the 2020 Inprint Alexander Prize in Fiction and of the Manuel G. Flores Prize from Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. She is a 2016 VONA Fellow and a second-year MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Her flash fiction has been published in TAYO Literary Magazine and as part of the graphic novel anthology, KOLACHE, published by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. Her collaborative work has also been exhibited in the 2016 show Looming, at the Aurora Picture Show. She is currently at work on both a novel and a collection of short stories, and continuing her Hagiographies flash fiction series.

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Hello

Mother of Invention: A Generative Workshop for Poets and Writers

Saturday Morning
with Lauren Berry
Saturday May 2
from 10-2
(installment plan/discounts)

Even as we take our first steps away from our mothers, we are forever tethered to them. This tether can feel like an anchor that secures us to a warm sense of belonging or a restraint that prevents us from the fullest expression of our being. Whether the word “mother” sparks bitter or sweet associations, the imprint of this relationship indelibly shapes our identity. As we transition into adulthood, we witness the echoes of our mothers in our thoughts, words, and actions. In this generative Mother's Day themed workshop, participants will examine a thematically diverse range of published poetry about mothers, mother figures, and the experience of mothering others. All experience levels and genres are welcome to join us as we draft new work in the welcoming community of Grackle and Grackle. Everyone will leave with several drafts and ideas for future writing sessions.

Lauren Berry received a BA in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MFA from the University of Houston where she won the Inprint Verlaine Prize and served as poetry editor for Gulf Coast. From 2009 to 2010, she held the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute. Her work has appeared in magazines such as Agni, Silk Road, The Adroit Journal, Denver Quarterly, and Iron Horse Literary Review. Terrance Hayes selected her first collection, The Lifting Dress (Penguin, 2011), to win the National Poetry Series prize. Her second collection, The Rented Altar, won the C&R Press Award in poetry and will be released in September of 2020. She teaches AP English Literature at YES Prep Public Schools, a charter school that provides college preparatory education to Houston's most underserved communities.

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ZOOM MEETING INFORMATION

ZOOM MEETING INFORMATION

The photo above is from the first Zoom class we taught. You can see & hear the participants, sometimes a poem or idea the teacher wants to show, and the faces of most of the other people in the class. 

Using Zoom is free. We will invite you to the class with an email that looks like the one below. The best experience comes when you use a desktop computer or laptop. Laptops often have cameras & microphones installed, you may have to order a camera if you have a desktop (for a list of webcams to buy look at this wirecutter article. I have the $32 camera/mic and it is fine:)

If you don't have a laptop or desktop computer, use a smartphone. You just download the Zoom app. Everybody will be able to see you and you can see the speaker. It's a good option. 

If you don't have a smartphone, you can call in to one of the phone numbers and just participate by voice!

This is what the email you'll get looks like. You click on the link and follow directions, or dial the phone number and follow directios.

Topic: Grackle and Grackle Meeting
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/383251799

Meeting ID: 383 251 799

One tap mobile
+13462487799,,383251799# US (Houston)
+16699009128,,383251799# US (San Jose)

Dial by your location
+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
+1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose)
+1 301 715 8592 US
+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
+1 646 558 8656 US (New York)
+1 253 215 8782 US
Meeting ID: 383 251 799
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/acVdOpDxOc

Grackle & Grackle is an endeavor of love. Our goal is to offer graduate-quality instruction in the Heights. We relish working with Houston non-profits and businesses -- whether it be working with University of Houston's literary magazine "Glass Mountain," finding quotations for the "Figurative Poetics" banner project CORE Design Studio created for Downtown District, busking with Inprint, helping M.D. Anderson's Arts in Medicine program and Aurora Picture Show write a movie with kids, or creating and teaching a special residency for the Creative Writers at HSPVA. We always look forward and are open to new collaborations.

Grackle & Grackle Literary Enterprises

819 Highland Street
Houston, TX  77009
832-584-0393

http://grackleandgrackle.com

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