Poetry Workshop with Jayne Benjulian

Join us on Sunday, March 1st from 1:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. for a poetry workshop led by Jayne Benjulian. The cost is $75.00 per person. Register early! The workshop is limited to 9 participants.

How do we re-set an experience that moved or cut us deeply and frame it so that the reader is moved too? How can our feelings become relevant to others? 

The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow is thrilled to offer a poetry workshop led by author and poet, Jayne Benjulian, to help answer these questions. This workshop is designed for writers who want to understand how to make art of their feelings. It will focus on finding the emotional core of each poem and on attentiveness to the mission of each writer; working with voice, language, and structure; using as models examples of master poems. In the form of collaborative learning, we’ll learn from poets we read as well as those in the workshop who are doing something different than we are, and let their practices influence our work.

Our working method will be to pose questions (rather than prescriptions) that help each poet reflect on the language and choices available in each poem, and we’ll develop skill in asking the questions about our own poems that lead to fruitful revisions beyond the workshop.

Workshop participants should bring a draft of a poem, or a piece you envision as a poem (maximum one page), assuming nothing is polished or finished. 

Jayne Benjulian is the author of Five Sextillion Atoms (Saddle Road Press, June 2016). She has always been a writer. She grew up in suburban backyards and has also lived on on an island, in a cabin in the hills, and a house under the redwoods. She began writing as a young girl, leaving letters under the mattress to read years later to see who she had been. Her work appears in numerous journals, including  Agni, Barrow Street, The Cortland Review, Poet Lore, Nimrod, Poetry Daily, the performance journal HowlRound, and Women’s Review of Books. Jayne teaches the writing and performance of poetry and monologue, and coaches both poets and prose writers.  To learn more about Jayne Benjulian, please visit jaynebenjulian.com