Webinars
“I truly love your manner with the students. I particularly admire the way you help them find ways to not settle for the easy response, but to look inside to connect to something meaningful.”
NOTE: For instructional fee-based webinars, each session’s replay video will be emailed within 24 hours post-session and be available for viewing and reviewing for 6 months, so you won’t miss anything if you can’t attend “live.” This also means you can register for an in-progress webinar.
- PROSE POEM: The Gateway Genre
When: 5 Thursdays, March 2, 9, 16, 23, 30
12:00–2:00 PM (Eastern) / 9:00–11:00 AM (Pacific)
Cost: $149
“What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose,” Gertrude Stein states rather than asks, suggesting that the distinction is either unknowable or unessential. Is the prose poem a hybrid, elegant and inventive, or a mongrel, unrefined and unharmonious? We will discuss model poems representing the various strains of prose poetry to investigate the sentence as a structural unit, prose as a movement of language, and the prose poem as a vehicle of subject matter. We will then use those poems as launching pads for our own prose poems.
- THE UNINVISIBLES Spring Equinox Roundtable
When: Monday, March 20
6:30–8:00 PM (Eastern) / 3:30–5:00 PM (Pacific)
Cost: FREE
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer,” writes Zora Neale Hurston, in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Wow, the wisdom of women writers (or, WOWW!). Join us for this biannual panel of women writers at the wisdom stage of life, to learn from their unique experiences and their literary work. This, our third, panel features Nancy Issenman, Tina Johnson, Leslie B. Neustadt, Andrea Penner, and Shirley Weyrauch.
- POET AS WITNESS OF A MOMENT
When: Monday, April 3
6:30–8:30 PM (Eastern) / 3:30–5:30 PM (Pacific)
Cost: FREE, in celebration of National Poetry Month
Paul Éluard wrote, “There is another world, and it is in this one.” Poems we remember, poems we return to, likely presence for us what it means to be human as a secular spiritual being. How do we write poems that transcend mere description of our visible world? Conversely, how do we write poems about the invisible world, without weighty abstractions, and instead with the sensory details of our earthbound lives? We will look at poems by other poets to discuss whether they successfully or unsuccessfully bear witness to human experience. We will then generate our own poems while attending to aspects of poem-making that establish the poet as credible witness.
- POWER GRID: An Open-Critique Salon
When: 4 Mondays, April 3, 10, 17, 24
12:00–2:00 PM (Eastern) / 9:00–11:00 AM (Pacific)
Cost: $99
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to the collective intelligence of a group of poets! Some of us, however, don’t feel ready to participate in a standard critique group, even though we know how challenging it is to upgrade our work when the same mind that drafted our poems is the same mind revising them. POWER GRID is designed to serve those poets, as well as poets who are a smidge bored with the typical critique-group experience.
POWER GRID is for you if you:
- are game for an adventurous, different critique-group experience.
- learn more about poem-making from the discussion and critique of others’ poems.
- wish to cultivate objectivity about poem-making without compromising your authority.
- want to rapidly reinforce and practice the distinctions and strategies we covered in POEMADE.
- love participating in a community of poets taking the same risks you are!
Each session, heavily facilitated by me (Marj), will present 4–6 poems from attendees, on a rotating basis, who’ve submitted (to me only) a one-page poem for cold-read group-critique. Attendees are not required to submit their work over the course of the four sessions. This webinar is limited to folks who’ve completed POEMADE or participated in one of my previous Advanced Seminar-Critique groups, so that our discussions happen at an accelerated, deepened level of po-understanding.
- 14 LINES TO LIBERATION: Writing the American Sonnet
When: 4 Tuesdays, April 4, 11, 18, 25
12:00–2:00 PM (Eastern) / 9:00–11:00 AM (Pacific)
Cost: $129
What’s so “American” about the American sonnet? The rugged individualism and pioneer spirit ingrained in the American identity has been expanding the province of the sonnet since the 19th century, departing from its traditional counterparts in terms of rhyme scheme, meter, and subject matter. Is the American sonnet, then, an act of resistance, or an homage, or both? We’ll explore this question through a brief review of traditional sonnet models, the reading of contemporary American sonnets, and the writing of our own.
- SENTIMENT VS. SENTIMENTALITY: Discerning the Difference Via the Work of Ted Kooser and Norman Rockwell
When: Wednesday, April 26
6:30–8:30 PM (Eastern) / 3:30–5:30 PM (Pacific)
Cost: $29
Most artists, of any medium, would agree that emotion is a necessary driver in their artmaking. But when does emotion become a liability? How do we write about love, nostalgia, children, animals, the beautiful, the quaint, the sympathetic, without gushing, fawning, rhapsodizing, weeping all over the page? To celebrate (belatedly!) Ted Kooser’s 84th birthday (April 25), we’ll discuss his poems alongside Norman Rockwell’s paintings to explore how to treat subject matter and craft language such that our poems compel, rather than manipulate or contrive or even deaden, an emotional response in our reader.
- FIRST IMPRESSION: Writing the Right Title for Your Poem
When: TBD; registration not open yet
Cost: $39
Doorway. Headline. Outcome. Orientation. Preview. Context. Definition. Setting. Lenses. How does a poem’s title function? Let me count the ways! We’ll explore these many ways by discussing poems with titles that effectively greet the reader as they enter the particular space of the poem. We’ll examine the titles of some of our own poems to discern whether (or not), and how, they support the poem they aim to open.
- PoemChrome: What Black-and-White Photography Can Teach Us About a Poem’s Tone and Mood
When: TBD; registration not open yet
Cost: $39
A visual artwork doesn’t (usually) rely on language to communicate, but we’re still able to make meaning when we view it, perceiving it through the body, seemingly bypassing the brain. A literary artwork does rely on language, but does it convey meaning exclusively through the meaning of the language itself? We’ll explore well-made monochromatic photographs and well-made poems to discern how words, lines, stanzas are crafted to create subtextual effects, and then apply the strategies we discover to our own poems.
- HYBRID-ARTS SELF-PACED LEARNING
If you missed any iterations of the hybrid-arts series that ran from January through June 2021 (“Cross My Heart and Hope to Fly: What Can Writers Learn from the Other Arts?” and “RE: RE: RE: Practice, Process, Product”), you can grab these video learnings now, by the month or the bundle, and explore, at your own pacing, these focused, meaty inquiries that will serve your writing, from conception to execution.
Each one-hour session provides:
- One or more brief samples of nonliterary artforms.
- A group discussion about what those samples can teach us about artistic conceptualization, craft, and presentation.
- Sample writings demonstrating those concepts.
- One or more writing challenges applying those concepts.
CHOOSE your learning by the MONTH or BUNDLE:
COST:
By the month: $22/month ($5.50 per one hour of inquiry & instruction)
By the bundle: If you prefer to pick-and-choose from among the month-by-month sessions outlined below, simply choose one or more bundle options:
- any 1 session: $10
- any 2 sessions: $18 ($9/session)
- any 3 sessions: $24 ($8/session)
- any 4 sessions: $30 ($7.50/session)
JANUARY
- Photography: Form Serving Content / Rule of Thirds
- Music: Embodiment / Charging Meaning
- Comedy: Word Choice & Scene-Setting
- Painting: Making the Familiar Unfamiliar
FEBRUARY
- Film: Imagery & Metaphor / Pacing
- Cartoon-Drawing: Composition & Sequencing
- Photography: Point of View & Psychological Distance
- Songwriting: Scaffolding /Associating
APRIL
- Photography: Frame Within a Frame
- Poetry/Music/Comedy: Listening
- Cartoon-Drawing/Painting/Comedy/Poetry: Knowing What to Put In & What to Leave Out
- Film: Inessential vs. Essential Mystery
MAY
- Photography: Symmetry & Asymmetry / Balance & Tension
- Sculpture: Material & Shape
- Music / Film Score: Tension Through Music
- Cartoon-Drawing/Comedy/Painting: Subversion
(via Comfort/Familiarity/Clichés)
JUNE
- Photography/Painting/Film: Micro/Macro & Abstraction (Close & Faraway)
- Photography: Negative Space
- Painting/Music/Dance: Medium/Components vs. Subject/Experience/“(Un)Reality”
- Photography/Painting/Music: Affirmation vs. Astonishment (Note: This session will be more meaningful if considered in relation to the #3 content.)
TO PURCHASE by the month or the bundle:
- Go to: paypal.me/MarjHahne
- Click “Send”.
- Insert the total cost of your month(s) ($22 per month) OR your bundle(s).
- In the “Add a note” section, indicate which month(s) you want (e.g., January, June) OR which sessions you want by month and number (e.g., February #2, May #4, June #3).
- Once I receive PayPal’s e-notification, I will email you each session’s replay video and materials.
