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Thursday, October 2, 2014

Writers' Workshoppe Marathon Poetry Writing Session, September 27, 2014

On a gorgeous fall day in a small fishing town with more writers than you can shake a caesura at, Kelli Russell Agodon and I excitedly breezed into a conference room on Main Street, each of us equipped with close to a dozen writing prompts in our satchels. Our goal: keep the customer satisfied, the customers being five poets who'd come there precisely to write till they dropped.

Six hours and EIGHT rough drafts later, we knew we'd done our job,  our sturdy and steadfast team o five exiting the building with new poem drafts about jobs they never had (including working in a potato chip factory and as a fisheries biologist) and poems that began with "When ...", along with poems written in one long run-on sentence, poems made of coined compound words, and poems that interrogate and rearrange cliches.

It. Was. Fun.

Below, a few pics that share a taste of the deep digging, the going there, and, most of all, all of us writing like the dickens.





Thanks so much to Anna Quinn and The Writers' Workshoppe for letting us laugh and play (and cry a little too) and to the participants and their never-flagging spirits.

If you want a taste of what went on, pick up a copy of The Daily Poet. Our workshops don't limit themselves to these prompts, but the book is a good enough substitute till you can enroll in one of our classes.