Alice Templeton: Music Moves – Having Fun with Sound in Your Writing

1 Saturday, February 18, 10am-4pm
$130 members/$145 non-members

How often have you gotten stuck working on a poem or prose passage that has promise but falls flat? This frustration happens especially when a writer’s allegiance to concrete detail outweighs the pursuit of new, energetic language. Enriching the verbal musicality is one way to give depth, movement, and beauty to an otherwise lifeless draft.

Instructor Alice Templeton says, “During my recent residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, musicians would play music and swap songs every night. The experience returned me to my creative roots: songwriting. Pursuing the musical dimensions of language led my writing to places I never predicted. The poems were deeply pleasurable for me to write and to share with others, and, best of all, my work took a thematic turn toward joy.”

This workshop will offer in-class exercises to help writers become more alert to the possibilities of sound, rhythm, complex rhyme, and musical form in their work. We will write and share our discoveries with each other. Writers are also asked to bring one poem or short prose piece that they feel is stalled, to use for experimenting with insights about improvisation and musicality.

Alice Templeton’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Calyx, Asheville Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and her chapbook Archaeology won the 2008 New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry from Finishing Line Press. Alice has been a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Moulin a Nef (France), Blue Mountain Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony. She teaches creative writing and humanities at the Art Institute of California-San Francisco.