Transformation Central – Writing Life in Lines

with Visiting Artist Laura Lee Washburn

The class will consider transformational experiences; moments of joy or trauma, survival or confusion.

Participants will write at least one poem about a transformative moment in their lives or in the life of another person as a means of controlling experience. After considering the way poets have used line breaks to transform or emphasize meaning at the level of the line, participants will play with lines, revising and refocusing their words in the interest of creating effects that draw readers into their work. Participants will be invited to share their work.

Laura Lee Washburn is a University Professor and the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, the author of "This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition" (March Street), "Watching the Contortionists" (Palanquin Chapbook Prize), and "The Book of Stolen Images" (forthcoming, Meadowlark). Harbor Review’s microchap prize is named in her honor, and she’s on the President of Small Harbor Publishing’s Board of Directors. Her degrees are from Old Dominion University, where she interned for the Associated Writing Programs Newsletter, and from Arizona State University. Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she has also lived and worked in Arizona and in Missouri. From her home in Pittsburg, Kansas, she fights as she can for equity, feminism, social justice and inclusion by partnering in grass roots efforts and with local charity and activist groups.

During the Visiting Artist program, Laura will work toward a chapbook, writing poems, and working on revision of poems. To make her poems accessible to an audience other than the audience that reads print, she will make audio recordings of poems in "The Book of Stolen Images" which is soon to be published in print form by Meadowlark Books.

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