Mass Poetry Festival 2012

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop (CWW) is a writing studio that offers craft of writing classes, feedback sessions, and in-session writing exercises to emerging and established writers of all genres. The CWW aims to help writers open up their imagination and find a comfortable environment in which to write. In this session, entitled “On Writing and Craft” with the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, audience members will have a chance to hear and experience some of the writing that CWW participants and writers have produced in and for workshops over the course of the past year. (Examples include collaborative poems from The Blue Notebooks experimental writing projects, “Odradek” pieces, and ekphrastic poetry, and other writing produced from the CWW writing workshops.) The reading portion of the session will be followed by a discussion on “The Craft of Writing.” CWW participants will list some of th e books and exercises, which best helped motivate and sustain their own writing this past year. We will also go over CWW workshop experiences and the kinds of intellectual discussions and debates inspired by the salon atmosphere of the CWW studio in Brooklyn. During this conversation, audience members will be actively invited to ask questions or engage in the conversation on stage. Finally, in the last portion of the programming, audience members will be asked to write based on a prompt. Audience members will have 12 minutes to compose their written pieces, and those who wish to share will have 10-15 minutes to do so. The program will wrap up with a quick Q&A on the experience of writing in-session prompts and participating in writing projects as a larger collective.