Writing Into Paradox

Live Online :: Monday, August 28, 2023 (8-9:30am Pacific)

We live in a paradoxical world, and are being asked more and more to hold the complexity of these times; natural beauty meets climate change, meets wars and newborn babies, and everything we hope for meets everything we fear. How as people do we make sense of these opposing truths? How as writers can we expand the way we hold these realities so that we can write into their complexity and represent the world as it is, with eyes wide open?

In this session with Laurie Wagner and her creative writing organization 27 Powers, Rosemerry will talk with us about:

• Why poetry and all of our writing need opposition.
• She’ll teach us how to use paradox in our writing so that we can face the page in a more honest, more complex way, and so we can write about what it really means to be alive.
• We will look at examples of paradox in our work.
• Rosemerry will lead us into some writing that invites us to see the complexities in our lives and bring them alive on the page.

The effect of paradox on the page and in the body is spaciousness. In the poem it says, this is how it is to be alive.

Everyone welcome.

PLEASE NOTE: For those who can’t make the live call or who want to review, the video replay will be sent within 24 hours of the live call.