Last Week to Sign Up for Poetry of Motherhood

by Peter Pryputniewicz

2013 Update: I'm adding my updated link to the January 2014 Poetry of Motherhood online workshop; please join us!

I’m very excited to be teaching an on-line poetry class: we will write poems as well as read poems by various mother writers (including poems published at The Fertile Source).

Help me spread the word…I still have spots available for this class, slated to start Monday, February 27 (and offered at an introductory rate of $100 for a month-long workshop on-line.

To the Cradle and Beyond: Excavating and Writing the Poetry of Motherhood

“My upstairs neighbor, mother of three, lives in a chronic extremity of demand that I witness from below as a kind of human storm. I do not think she would want to read poems that posit the singular solitary investigations of the privileged 'I' of lyric poetry."--Ann Lauterbach, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience

What kind of poems would that mother of three living “in a chronic extremity of demand” write? Wether you identify as the solitary mother writer (children fledged) listening from below, or the mother at the heart of the maelstrom of childrearing, join this on-line poetry circle for a chance to mine poetry of the past as well as contemporary poems (including those we’ve published at The Fertile Source) for structural and thematic inspiration for writing our own poems reflecting our experiences of motherhood. The confessional poets along with the honeycomb of the internet position us uniquely not only to communicate globally, but to write fearlessly about the realities of the complexities of the journey to, through, and beyond motherhood. Join us in this excavation and celebration of the layers we occupy simultaneously as mother writers.

This on-line course is open to all mother writers and all levels of writing experience. Weekly reading of poems paired with assignments for generating new poetry. Participant driven topics for poem generation encouraged; specific exercises offered for those who wish to use them. Guidelines for creating a safe and respectful comment community will be provided on enrollment.

“If, through caring for my children, I lost writing time, I gained by the expansion of vision and insight and compassion my experiences with them gave me…The writing I was able to do in those years is suffused with the energy my children radiated.” Pattiann Rogers, "Degree and Circumstance" (which appeared in Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition, Edited by Sharon Bryan)

“The subject [of motherhood] has been hijacked, candy-coated and polluted by such powerhouses as Victorian culture and the post-war Fifties in America. Luckily, artists and feminists set out to rescue us from the sickly-sweet ideal that had shrink-wrapped the experience and denied the complexity of the role.” Nancy White, Bringing to Birth: Poetry of Motherhood, Fall 2009 Sow’s Ear (read full review here).


Related post: So You Say You’re a Poetry Editor (on connecting with mothers and the poetry of motherhood)

On my She Writes blog, 2013:
Marketing and The Poetry of Motherhood: Sustaining Your Joy Factor