Writing Toward Joy, Dispelling the Dark - Workshop Series

This workshop is full. We are considering adding a second class later in 2025. If you are interested, please complete the short form below.

Dates: Mondays, January 13, 20, 27 and February 3

Time: 6:00–8:00 p.m. (EST)

Location: Virtual

About the Workshop Series: As we move into what many of us think will be darker times in this country and the world, we look for ways not just to survive but to sustain our creativity and our sense of hopefulness and joy. We find that, often, in community and in the making of art, in whatever form. The Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Theodore Roethke, who struggled with darkness much of his life, provides us with some words that we might consider. “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” he writes in “In a Dark Time,” and concludes his poem, “The Moment,” with “We end in joy.” We might think of our task now, as writers and as members of the human community, to be one where we begin to see through the darkness, finding the memories, the experiences, the people, and the moments which leave us with hope and with joy.

In this workshop we will read and talk about work where poets attempt to dispel the darkness, and we will write our own poems, attempting the same. During the four weeks of the workshop we will discover other poems which find joy in both expected and unexpected places, writing our own such poems and sharing them in workshop. Hopefully, we will end in joy.

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, that we have begun our real journey.” — Wendell Berry