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What To Do With the Memory: Finding a Way In

WAITLIST only. Email programs@mainewriters.org.

An ONLINE Poetry Workshop

ALL LEVELS

One day while walking home from the M train in Brooklyn, I saw a man stealing fruit on the corner of Myrtle Ave and Broadway. In a city of more than 6 million people, nothing that happened was surprising. But ever the poet, I wrote it down in my phone anyway and thought surely this mundane, very New York experience might find its way into a poem. Fast forward to a snowed-in January day, I thought I would use the quiet it would bring to sit down and write a poem. I looked through my phone and saw the line I had recorded months before, “As I watch a man steal fruit on the corner of Myrtle Ave and Broadway.” I wrote it at the top of the blank document, and almost without thought my next line was, “I want to know what to do with the memory.” These seemingly simple lines would then become the entrance into the poem, the Moby Dick of poems, the one I had been trying to write for over a decade about the traumatic event in my youth that shaped my sad girl psyche. I had entered the memory through a side door, one I didn’t know existed. The man stealing fruit was the door. In this workshop, we will explore our very own side doors, the way into the memory that haunts. We will read Catherine Barnett, Sharon Olds, and Marie Howe. This will be a generative space to explore and plant seeds for future poems. 

+ PLEASE NOTE This workshop will occur ONLINE. The week of the workshop attendees will be emailed a zoom link.


Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second poetry collection Good Monster is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship; and received her MFA at NYU where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for the Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project.


ADVANCE REGISTRATION REQUIRED
All MWPA workshops require advanced registration. We accept registration by phone, mail, and online via our website. We cannot guarantee registration in the final 24-hours before a workshop, and can rarely accommodate day-of registration.

PAYMENT & CANCELLATION POLICIES
If you need to withdraw from a class after registering for any reason, please email or call the MWPA immediately. You may be eligible for a partial refund or credit, depending on how far in advance you cancel. → MORE INFORMATION

QUESTIONS
For any questions regarding this workshop, please contact programs@mainewriters.org.

REGISTER BY PHONE
Call 207-228-8263 and register with your VISA or MasterCard.

REGISTER BY MAIL
If you prefer to pay by mail, please print this registration form (downloadable PDF) and mail it to the MWPA with a check or credit card information.


$75 Members/$115 Nonmembers


SCHOLARSHIP
The MWPA is proud to offer one partial scholarship to this workshop for members-only. Scholarships are awarded on a combination of need and merit. Email programs@mainewriters.org to see if the scholarship is still available. Application Due by January 2 at 9:00 a.m.
→ MORE INFORMATION

MWPA WORKSHOP POLICIES
Registration in any MWPA workshop, program, or event constitutes your agreement to our terms and conditions. → MORE INFORMATION

Earlier Event: January 13
Developing Character & Building Plot
Later Event: January 17
Gather 55