During the week we will examine “bewilderment” by thinking about the concept and how it is acted out in our poems—either through syntax, our accessing the duende, leaps into the unconscious, or simply circling around what is unsaid, unknown, unrealized. We will look for those moments we begin to stutter and stumble when talking about our poems, or in the poems themselves, for these are the thresholds beyond which is unknown, beyond which is the white space on the map. Over the course of our week together we will attempt to push a little deeper into this shadow world. Participants will prepare by keeping a writer’s notebook and bringing a selection of work (2-3 poems) at various states of completion to the first workshop session.
NICK FLYNN is the author of Some Ether‚ winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, Blind Huber, and The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (Graywolf, 2011). He has written three memoirs, his most recent The Reenactments (Graywolf, 2013). His memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and has been translated into fifteen languages. The Ticking is the Bomb, a memoir of deciding to become a father while the country is engaged in two wars, was published by Norton in 2010. He has been awarded fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Amy Lowell Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His poems, essays, and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, NPR’s This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. Being Flynn, a film based on Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, was released in 2012 and stars Robert DeNiro, Julianne Moore and Paul Dano. Nick teaches at the University of Houston.
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