April Courses: Beginning Blogging, Poetry Workshop, and a Tarot Writing Exercise for You

Thursdays April 10-May 22: Beginning Blogging, Coronado Adult Education:

I’m looking for two more San Diego area or Coronado bloggers to round out my beginning blogging class through Coronado Adult Education. The course runs on Thursday evenings from 6:00-8:00 p.m. starting April 10th through May 22nd (7 weeks) for $77 or $69 for Sr.  To register, visit Coronado Adult Education's Website.

Course description:

 This course offers beginning bloggers the chance to create material to launch a blog or to recalibrate an existing blog through completing a series of writing exercises and inventories. We look at blog platforms and blog technique; we also preview the Web for examples. We create content, discuss image use, and refer to a checklist towards blog launch. Students will emerge with sample posts and a map in hand for how to proceed in the future. While students may bring laptops or iPads to class, I welcome writers and bloggers at all stages of comfort level with technology, so please bring a notebook and pencil to each class (laptop/ipad not required).

Saturday, April 12: Poetry Play: A Tour of the Forms

I’ll also be braving it across the blue bridge for my first time teaching for San Diego Writers, Ink—this 4 hour workshop is slated for Saturday April 12 and runs $60 for SDWI members and $72 for non-members. I hope you’ll come out for a wild ride through as many forms as we can get to during our workshop. To register, visit San Diego Writers, Ink. Course description:

Do you haiku? Every written a haibun, aubade, or epistolary poem? Want to try your hand at a sestina, sonnet, or villanelle? During this four-hour workshop we will fearlessly and playfully write our way towards working drafts of as many of the forms as we can.

We’ll start with the deceptively simple but evocative gem of haiku. Then we’ll breathe into the slightly pithier prose lead required of the haibun with its haiku chaser. Next up: dawn songs, or aubades, for a love lost or left at sunrise. And then, hearts astir, we turn to the letter form: if you could write a letter to anyone, placed at any juncture in time, who would you address?

The last three of our forms—sestina, sonnet, and villanelle—present challenges of rhyme and word repetition and more, but fear not: we will map out a potential course for poems you’ll write later on your own. Bring a notebook and pen; writers across the spectrum welcome, including absolute beginners. While I will provide examples of each form, please feel free to bring in favorite poems written in these forms to share with the group. Come out and play!

A Writing Exercise for You to Try:

Earth, Air, Fire and Water: Using the Tarot to Inspire Your Writing Practice is a guest post I wrote for Jan Marquet, a colleague at Story Circle Network, live at “Free the Pen.” It is a gentle way to begin to understand the structure that most Tarot Decks use at their basis for the Minor Mentors. This exercise encourages us to start with our own experience of the four elements before turning to the cards for depictions of how our experiences of the elements might manifest.