The Zine Machine: On Zine Creation and Publication Workshop at MWC

Join Morgan Webb (RatTrap Magazine) and Melissa Conway (Recycled Valentine Press) for a 4-week workshop where you’ll learn how to turn your human brain into a ZINE MACHINE!! Participants will be guided through the full zine creation process from coming up with an idea and finding your medium, all the way to publication and distribution. Morgan Webb and Melissa Conway will share a variety of zine-making techniques and bring insight from their own publications as well as insight from other local artists in the community. Pitch your zine to the Midwest Writing Center for publication during the showcase at the end of the workshop! MWC will publish 2-3 zine projects.

Writing Malleable and True: Hybrid Writing Workshop from MWC & Brink Books

Brink Books’ full-length anthology of hybrid writing, Malleable and True, is an innovative collection for readers, writers, and educators that explores the complexity and craft of hybrid writing. This anthology is also a workbook in which the writers of each piece explore the craft behind the work and offer prompts based on their work.

The Midwest Writing Center, in collaboration with Brink Books, brings this project to life by bringing four Brink contributors to the Quad Cities to teach from Malleable and True. Each of four sessions will focus on a piece of writing from Brink and, using its author’s methods, assist participants in generating new work.

“Write a Musical Score within Poems” Workshop led by Sal Marici, May 16 at MWC

The Midwest Writing Center is hosting a poetry workshop facilitated by Salvatore Marici, author of several collections and chapbooks from Ice Cube Press.

Write a Musical Score within Poems
Music invokes feelings. Musicians have physical tools to create music. Poets’ tools are the skillful arrangements of words and their sounds to convey and reinforce the imagery, meaning that will invoke an emotional response to a poem. Soft repetitive sounds encourage readers to float in a breeze; hard repetitive sounds put readers in a car crash. Rhymes end like nursery rhymes. Rhymes hidden within lines. A pattern of up and down sounds via stress and unstress syllables. We will play with these sound devices. You will write your own score with riffs inside your poem that create imagery, invoke feelings and clarifies meaning.