Poetry of Fatherhood On-line Workshop with Tania Pryputniewicz

Heavy in pursuit of building the life of my dreams, I've spent a month teaching our first ever on-line course at Mother, Writer, Mentor: To the Cradle and Beyond, Writing and Excavating the Poetry of Motherhood. The course exceeded all expectations, for me, as an instructor, because these women wrote fearlessly and held nothing back and came up with some beautiful poems. I am so grateful and so moved to have had the opportunity to share their process. Beyond that, it was a gift to mine the poems Jessica and I have published at The Fertile Source, to stop and appreciate the work archived there and to use it as inspiration for present work. We are working on ways to showcase student work at Mother, Writer, Mentor. More on that shortly.

With a  month's breather inbetween (to sit in on Jess's Sexy Mommy Stories: Writing Romance Back into Literature course,), I will be teaching The Poetry of Fatherhood in April. Jess and I shortly figured out at The Fertile Source that the planet-sized domain of pregnancy, labor, birth, fertility, abortion, miscarriage, adoption and related tangential topics related to sexuality (obviously, right?) is not solely occupied by women. It took awhile, but gradually, I was receiving a fair number of submissions from male writers.

As we prepared to launch Mother, Writer, Mentor, while we wanted to offer writing mothers some respite on our blog and in our on-line classes, we again realized that we share this room with our male contributors and wish neither to exclude nor overlook them. In looking for teaching materials for The Poetry of Motherhood, I came across material for The Poetry of Fatherhood (the course had already written its outline, once again, in archived material at The Fertile Source). I hope you'll come out to write with me for the month of April. Perhaps by next year we will have ourselves in sync, offering Poetry of Motherhood in May in time for Mother's Day and Poetry of Fatherhood in June in time for Father's Day. This go around, the poems celebrating each came a month early.

Excavating and Writing The Poetry of Fatherhood

Instructor: Tania Pryputniewicz
Dates: April 30- May 25
Fee: still at our opening discounted rate of $100 (from $125)

You’ve watched the wife’s body transform before your eyes, witnessed first-hand her incremental emotional, psychological and spiritual migration to places you may or may not be able, though willing, to follow. Your own metamorphosis, while less physically apparent, is in actuality no less arduous or multi-layered. Or you and your partner have gone through longer gestations: reams of applications, false leads, interviews and further scrutiny while attempting to adopt. Or you’ve chosen not to father, but find the words of your own father coursing through your mind. Join this on-line poetry class 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 towards the writing of a new crop of poems reflecting the continuum of experiences that comprise fatherhood. Sign up here.