Eventful October

I’m thrilled that my October is full of poetry events!  On October 15, I will be the keynote speaker at the League of Minnesota Poets fall gathering at Arrowwood Lodge in Baxter, MN, 1:30 pm.    (click for more info).  Title of the talk TBA.

I also was honored to be asked to judge the Brainerd Writers’ Alliance annual poetry contest.  I will be presenting the awards and saying a bit about the winning poems at the BWA Fall Festival at Northland Arboretum  on October 29.  Winners will be invited to read their poems.

Finally, after a two-year hiatus for graduate school, I am starting my online teaching for The Loft Literary Center again, and registration is now open for Writing the Short Poem, a 10-week intensive craft class for poets of any experience level who are serious about studying craft and improving their poetry writing. Click HERE for more info and/or to register. It’s a class I absolutely love teaching, and I’ve missed it!  For previous members of this class, an advanced short poem class continuing our work together will be available (tentatively) in the spring.  I’m working on the course proposal now, and I hope that The Loft will want to offer it.  Watch for an email from me asking about interest from former Writing the Short Poem participants–if I can show that there’s real demand, I’m sure it will be offered.

A little further out, I’ll be reading at the Quatrefoil Library in Minneapolis on December 9 with fellow Minnesota poets Wendy Brown Baez and Michael Kiesow Moore.  More details soon.

I’m about a quarter of the way through my semester-long poetry writing moratorium/recovery-period/fallow-time-in-anticipation-of-later-harvest, and I’m already getting an itch to start writing.  I’ll resist it, because I want it to grow into an irresistible compulsion, and I’m not quite there yet. Meanwhile, I’m really happy to have these events on the schedule to tide me over.