Photographer and filmmaker Agnes Varda said, “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” In this generative three-week online workshop with Elizabeth Jacobson, participants open themselves up to story and the essence of human song, exploring the narrative and the lyric in three different creative writing genres: poetry, memoir, and lyric essay.
We read poems and short prose pieces by a range of writers, including Jamaica Kincaid, Joy Harjo, Natalia Ginsburg, Viviane Gornick, Sei Shonagon, Terrance Hayes, Chloe Cooper Jones, Cold Mountain, Diane Seuss, Jake Skeets, Marilyn Nelson, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, and Barry Lopez.
In addition to group sessions that encompass conversations about craft, discussions of reading material, and writing from prompts, participants are given several opportunities to share work in group critiques. A week before the workshop begins, you are provided with a reading packet, and at-home writing assignments are offered each session.
You are encouraged to write in whatever genre inspires you, perhaps trying something different. This practice is intimate and vigorous, inviting a deep exploration of the personal landscapes within. As you gain new resources, insights, perspectives, and tools to support you on your creative journeys, you discover why so many people find the writing process to be therapeutic and joyful.
Class will meet 12:30 – 2:30 pm (Mountain Time) on Mondays and Thursdays starting February 26 and ending March 14 (six online group sessions). Enrollment is limited to 12 participants.
Zoom Video Conferencing software (available for no charge from Zoom.com) will be used to facilitate the class sessions. Further details will be emailed to registrants.
Santa Fe Workshops always aims to produce a high-quality experience for our online attendees. That said, variables including regional and local internet provider speeds, traffic on Zoom's servers, and your own computing hardware can contribute to a less than ideal streaming event. While we do our best to minimize the impact of these variables, they are outside the control of Santa Fe Workshops.
View Withdrawal and Transfer Policies for online programs.
For the convenience of participants, recordings of each class session are posted privately for one month after the end of each session. Santa Fe Workshops takes the recordings down after one month to protect the intellectual property of our instructors.
Elizabeth Jacobson received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and a BA from Rollins College. She was an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laurate Fellow and the fifth poet laureate of Santa Fe, where she also founded the WingSpan Poetry Project, a nonprofit that conducted poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters from 2013 to 2020. Elizabeth’s work has been published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Plume, The Los Angeles Review, and Lana Turner. She is a reviews editor for the online magazine Terrain, and her third collection of poems, There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, has a 2024 release date.
Website: linktr.ee/ElizabethJacobson
