Houses for Spirits: Poems of the Ecstatic & Divine Led By Merle Geode
Saturday, January 15th - Sunday, January 16th, 2022 | 12 PM ET - 3:00 PM ET
Tuition | $100.00
Capacity: 20 Storytellers
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo stated in a 2008 HoCoPoLitSo “The Writing Life” interview that poems are houses for spirits and it is from this statement that this workshop was born. Poems are vessels. This two-day workshop will take a deep dive into the expansive possibilities of poetry as a vehicle for something greater than, and also intrinsically a part of, us as humans, centering BIPOC voices. From Rumi to Lucille Clifton and even genre-blending/bending artists such as Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagak whose poetry appears in her first novel, Split Tooth, we will explore poems as vessels, and poets as channels through which the divine—in whatever incarnation that manifests—moves through them. This two day workshop will be a combination of reading and discussing poetry as well as writing poetry in this vein. Participants will also receive guidance on creating a writing ritual and deep listening to tune in to the deeper currents in which poems dwell.
About the Faculty: Merle Geode (they/them) is a mixed race Korean/white disabled, nonbinary poet, writer, shamanic practitioner, and multidisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis, MN. They have a B.S. degree in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where they were a UW-Madison Writing Fellow. They are currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and a mentor in the Write Like Us program for BIPOC writers across five Twin Cities-area community colleges. Their work appears in Love, Always: Partners of Trans People on Intimacy, Challenge and Resilience; MNArtists; and poetry.onl. Currently, they are working on a picture book about anticipatory grief and death as an author/illustrator. They were a 2019 Loft Literary Center Mirrors & Windows Fellow during which they focused on this book project.
Partial and full scholarships are available. Email scholarship inquiries to Info@RootsWoundsWords.org. Explicitly state the scholarship (partial or full) you’re interested in.
Like all RWW offerings, this space is for Black, Indigenous, Latinx/e, Asian, and other Storytellers of Color only. BIPOC Storytellers are centered here, exclusively.