2024 Virtual Speaker Series
I Learn by Going Where I Have to Go: Conversations with Writers about their Influences and Models
About the series
In one of Theodore Roethke’s most well-known villanelles, “The Waking,” he repeats four times, with variations, “I learn by going where I have to go." We can all reflect on the work of writers who have been influences on our own writing and our lives, either in their general approaches to the craft or in specific poems.
In this series, four well-established poet teachers will share poems and stories from the writers who helped shape their craft and approaches to poetry, along with sharing their own poems where they see the influence of these models and mentors. Help us celebrate National Poetry Month 2024 by joining in these conversations. There will be time for questions and comments from participants before the session concludes. Sessions will meet each Tuesday in April from 7:00 to 8:00 PM ET.
About the session
Leila Chatti will discuss her relationship with the poet Dorianne Laux, her mentor and collaborator, and the influence of Laux on her work. She will also discuss writing the “I,” the ultra-personal, and her relationship to the “confessional” mode, reading examples from her own work and the work that first opened the doors for her—poems by Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, and Slyvia Plath.
About Leila Chatti
Leila Chatti is the author of the new chapbook Figment (Bull City Press, 2022), an innovative work that uses poetic fragmentation and a capacious interpretation of abecedarian form to navigate the overwhelming silences that surround pregnancy loss. Poet and essayist Caryl Pagel writes that Chatti “reminds us that it’s a poet’s imperative…to cultivate and suffer relationships with what’s beyond: the nothingness we’ll never know, a notion’s shadow, or ‘fiction with some // truth to it.’”Chatti, a champion of the chapbook form, has written three other chapbooks in addition to Figment, including a collaborative conversation with Dorianne Laux, The Mothers (Slapering Hol Press, 2022) as well as the acclaimed full-length collection, Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Among Chatti’s many honors, she has been awarded grants and fellowships from the N.E.A., the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. Chatti is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
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