Poets go all out at Greenbank workshop

Poets and poetry lovers are invited to register for an All-Day, All-Out Poetry Bash from 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. today in Greenbank.

Popular master poets Lorraine Healy and Sarah Zale will teach two-and-a-half-hour hands-on, craft-packed workshops for poets and prose-writers who wish to improve their poetic skills.

Participants will pick up instructions for the day at the Rob Shouten Gallery at the Greenbank Farm, and then attend small group sessions in private homes with participants switching venues after the lunch break. Lunch is provided.

Zale’s class will examine the styles of different poets, discuss the extent to which their poems tell a story and then decide what poetic tools make a story powerful. Participants will then apply these tools to their own poems.

Zale teaches writing and poetry in the Seattle area and The Writers’ Workshoppe in Port Townsend. Her collection of poems, “The Art of Folding,” was inspired by her travels to Israel and Palestine. “The Refugee at Al-Arroub Fails to Explain” won the 2009 Anita McAndrews Award/Poets for Human Rights. Her work also appears in the anthology “Come Together, Imagine Peace,” a finalist for the 2009 Eric Hoffer Award.

Healy will lead participants through an exercise to produce an original work to which editing strategies will be applied to produce a professional product.

Healy is an Argentinean poet and photographer and the winner of several national awards, including a Pushcart Prize nomination for poetry in 2004. Her first full-length manuscript, “The Habit of Buenos Aires,” won the Patricia Bibby First Book Award was published by Tebot Bach Press in 2010.

The All-Day, All-Out Poetry Bash concludes with an evening of soup, bread and open-microphone at Greenbank Farm’s Whidbey Pies Café at 5:30 p.m. Dinner is $12 and poetry readings are free.

For workshop details and registration information, visit Whidbey Island Writers Association online and click on “Workshops,” or call 360-341-1861.

Association members pay $75 per workshop; non-members pay $90. Discounts are available by joining the association at sign-up.

The Whidbey Island Writers Association’s full line-up of spring workshops, some of which are free, are listed on the website also.

 

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