"I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing." - John Cage


Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Debrief on June 21-27 at Community of Writers Poetry Week Conference in Olympic Valley: Part 1

 

The Community of Writers has been gathering in Olympic Valley for over 50 years, offering workshop weeks in Poetry in June and Creative Non-Fiction/Fiction in July. Last week I was fortunate to attend my fourth week at the Poetry Conference over many years, the first time I attended happening back in 2007 I believe. 

The Poetry Program at the Community of Writers is founded on the belief that when poets gather in a community to write new poems, each poet may well break through old habits and write something stronger and truer than before. To help this happen we work together to create an atmosphere in which everyone might feel free to try anything. - Community of Writers

Around 75 poets lived, ate, wrote, and discussed poetry together for the week, our goal being to compose a new and hopefully habit-breaking poem to share in workshop each morning. This program is a little different from other poetry workshops in that we don't share work we've already written and revised and spent time considering. The poems I shared each day were ideas and sounds and words and forms that I had spent much less than 24 hours on, sometimes only 90 minutes of writing. 

It was exhilarating to devote 3 or 4 hours each day, usually in the afternoon after lunch and before our evening craft talks, drafting lines. And then after dinner, returning to the poem-making late into the night or early morning. Sometimes I would sleep on the poem at some point, and shift things around in the morning before I submitted it to workshop.

But what is truly unique at CoW is the workshop style, something we all daily renew our surprise at how well it works to encourage experimentation and generating new work. In workshop, the Faculty poets (Pulitzer prize winners, experts in crafts and history, kind collaborators) guide the group in noting and excavating the places in the poems where wonderful emotion, image, juxtaposition, startling moves, original detail, and creative form build the experience of a poem on the page. Jane Miller calls certain types of openings in a poem "hinges," like in a book where the spine opens, to reveal yet another meaning in the poem. 

Meanings layer on meanings. This past week our poems wrestled with intersecting the poetic with the experience today of illegal and evil violence against our people, our communities, our health, our education, our science, our planet.

I collected a few books by the faculty and here are three books on the craft of writing poetry by Jane Miller, Brenda Hillman (the Director of CoW), and Forrest Gander. I love reading books on craft that reveal the brilliant minds of the author. 



Thursday, June 12, 2025

Tangled Roots Writing Summer Writing Series: Workshops for Poetry, Fiction, Memoir

Join Tangled Roots Writing this summer, tinker with your own writing, and build your writing community.

·       Each workshop covers tips for writing in all genres with an opportunity to ask specific questions you have on your own work.

·       The publication workshops cover many aspects of targeting and submitting your work in journals, magazines, newspapers and online as well as how to find and apply for artist residencies, conferences, and contests. Develop your repertoire of work that’s ready for submission.

·       All workshops include snacks and beverages.

·       Location is in the garden and living room of my historic home in downtown Truckee

Call/email for details and to sign up!

Contact: Kat Terrey, MFA, Poet Laureate of Nevada County

530-386-3901

Tangledrootswriting@gmail.com

 

 

Thursday, June 19

Writing beautiful prose for memoir and fiction in the garden – a workshop for anyone writing a book, essays or short stories who wants to strengthen techniques of structure, language and scene. $25

5:30-7:30 pm

 

Monday, June 30

Multi Genre Submissions Garden Party: Target your audience, prepare manuscript for submission, get published. For poetry, short stories, essays, and memoir. $25

5:30-7:30 pm

 

Friday August 15  

Poetry in the Garden – a generative workshop for anyone who wants to understand poetry or write poems and lyrical prose for memoir, essay, and fiction. $25

Noon – 2 pm

 

Friday, August 22 

Multi Genre Submissions Garden Party: Target your audience, prepare manuscript for submission, get published. For poetry, short stories, essays, and memoir. $25

5:30-7:30 pm

Monday, June 2, 2025

A Poetry Workshop for First Graders (SELS) at their Donner Memorial State Park Camp-out

Summer moon over

mountains as white as the tip

of a fox’s tail 

 

- Basho

In my mind, SELS hit another home run with teaching how to be a human.

I headed out to the campground at Donner Memorial State Park last week to meet up with Justine Minczeski's First Grade. She'd reached out to me to teach a poetry workshop to support the work her students have done on endangered animals. Our focus for poems and writing was on the animals the students chose to study: wolverines, bighorn sheep, gray wolves, Sierra Nevada red fox, spotted owls and Lahontan Cutthroat trout.  

"Did you bring a poem you wrote," asked one small student from beneath her pink backpack loaded with jacket, journal, and lunch. She looked up at me with such openness to discovery. I hadn't realized I'd be meeting an insistent audience eager for poetry. I opened on my phone a series of haiku I've written and read her one about a bat. 

"Can I see?" asked two more. A third wandered over to the side and peered into my phone screen. Delightfully, all four children began reading together out loud the poem to the bat, chanting the haiku like a spell or a birthday song:

Hello bat, wings of skin

and bearish ears, your shoulder shrug

is nearly human.

- Karen Terrey

The night before, a Park Ranger led this class on a night hike and activities so that today each student wore a Junior Ranger Badge on their shirt. This is the kind of life-long relationship building with nature and stewardship that Federal funding cuts sabotage, decades into the future.

As we walked towards the lake, we listened and looked and sniffed around us in the park, pretending to be inside the body of whichever animal we wanted to be. One student wrote a poem about a tree they passed that held a hollow for an owl to live. Another wrote about the green water and what might lie beneath it for a trout. A third wrote about a funny moment the night before when a bat chased a mosquito too closely around an adult's head on their night walk.

This poem below by Amy Lowell helped each student to introduce an unanswered question into their poems: 

The Trout   Amy Lowell

          Naughty little speckled trout,

          Can't I coax you to come out?

          Is it such great fun to play

          In the water every day?

 

          Do you pull the Naiads' hair

          Hiding in the lilies there?

          Do you hunt for fishes' eggs,

          Or watch tadpoles grow their legs?

 

          Do the little trouts have school

          In some deep sun-glinted pool,

          And in recess play at tag

          Round that bed of purple flag?

 

          I have tried so hard to catch you,

          Hours and hours I've sat to watch you;

          But you never will come out,

          Naughty little speckled trout!

 

How old are you, Tree? What do you want, Fox? This was a technique that helped them go deeper into their poems and understand that a poem can be an "imagination conversation" with something other than yourself. A poem can become a call, an open-ended wondering. They practiced making their imagination the first tool they picked up to write about these creatures and their homes, places that are also our homes.  

 

Did I mention yet the wonderful and caring attention the chaparoning parents gave these students, guiding them through inevitable challenging moments of hiking, camping, writing and working with others?