Tag: workshop

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

Posted on by Ryan Collins

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.

What a Poem Wants: New Poetry Critique Group at MWC, facilitated by Ryan Collins  

Posted on by Ryan Collins

The Midwest Writing Center is hosting a pay-what-you-can poetry critique group for “serious poets” — the next meeting is Wednesday, November 19 at 5:30 p.m. at their office in the Rock Island Public Library – Downtown branch. The group will be facilitated by poet and MWC Executive Director Ryan Collins.  

The group is open to poets who are actively working toward publishing their work and/or developing a new book or chapbook project, who have “a broad conception and appreciation of what a poem can be.” Collins said he hopes the group will be “an opportunity for poets writing adventurous work to engage and help each other find their poems’ most successful shapes.”

Writing Fear: How to Craft a Horror Protagonist and Get Under Their Skin with Tatiana Schlote-Bonne – 4/26, Online Workshop

Posted on by Ryan Collins

This workshop will guide you through creating a compelling protagonist and antagonist for a horror novel or short story. Questions we’ll consider: What scares your protagonist and why? What does the antagonist reflect about your protagonist’s fears? Why is your protagonist the right main character for this story? Generative writing prompts will help us figure out these elements of our stories and more. Using sensory details, we’ll place our protagonists in scenes where they must face their greatest fears–it’s good for them!