Rachel Long: Advanced Poetry Workshop: Family, Kin, and the Apparently Personal

In this workshop, we’ll delve (or drag our feet) into the quagmire of family: the unit, the brood, the clan. We’ll interrogate the notion of background, lineage, parentage, birth, marriage; all the people that populate our houses and hearts. There’ll be space to discuss the sticky issues of writing those close to us; how writing our version/experience of our relationships might come into collision with concerns of integrity. We’ll explore the notion of family in memory, persona and dreamscape, using poets like Sharon Olds, Warsan Shire and others as our guides.