STORIES I AIN’T TOLD My MOMMA-CREATING NARRATIVE POEMS

In this workshop we will look at some examples of narrative poems based on childhood or family stories. Storytelling in poetic form is very challenging, but it can also be very rewarding. Recreating the memories can open up our minds to all sorts of sensory details and interesting images that we can then explore later in lyric form, as well as narrative. Participants will have time for brainstorming and writing in response to the sample poems and then we will share some of those.

About the Presenter

Rita Sims Quillen’s new novel WAYLAND, a sequel to HIDING EZRA, published by Iris Press in 2019, is the March 2022 Bonus Book of the Month for the International Pulpwood Queens and Timber Kings Book Club. She also has a new and selected poetry collection, SOME NOTES YOU HOLD, (Madville Press) published in 2020. Her full-length poetry collection, The Mad Farmer’s Wife, published in 2016 by Texas Review Press, a Texas A & M affiliation, was a finalist for the Weatherford Award in Appalachian Literature from Berea College. One of six semi-finalists for the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Virginia, she has received three Pushcart nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination in 2012. She lives, farms, writes songs, and takes photographs at Early Autumn Farm in southwestern Virginia. Read more at http://www.ritasimsquillen.com.