Sonnet Writing Workshop with Ruth Weinstein

The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow is pleased to present a sonnet writing workshop instructed by Ruth Weinstein. The three-day workshop will be held on Friday and Saturday, September 25 and 26, from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm and on Sunday, September 27, from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm. The workshop is available online on Zoom or in person at The Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow located at 515 Spring Street in Eureka Springs. The class fee is $220 per person and includes eleven hours of instruction. Workshop attendees may reserve a writing suite at the subsidized rate of $75 per night based on availability and single occupancy. This workshop is designed for beginner to advanced writers who have not yet deeply explored sonnets or other complex rhyme forms. This will be an exciting and inspiring workshop for poets who want to expand their repertoire and increase their abilities to work in new forms and styles. Total attendance is limited to ten, so register early!

The health and safety of our workshop participants, resident writers, and staff are our top priority. The Writers’ Colony has implemented and is following strict COVID-19 protocols. In-person workshop attendees are limited to eight and must wear a mask.  Weather permitting, classes will be held outdoors on the deck. Should it be necessary to hold them indoors, seating will be spread out to give each participant a minimum of six feet of separation.

Friday’s session will be spent reading and discussing sonnets in English and translation from historical and contemporary poets in all three sonnet forms: Petrarchan, Spenserian, and Shakespearian. Saturday will be spent writing sonnets in all three forms. Themes, emotional states/mood, and cohesive employment of metaphor will be explored. Prompts and ideas will be shared, and participants will be encouraged to try different moods and themes. On Sunday, class will be spent sharing the sonnets participants have written, asking questions, and giving positive feedback.

Ruth has requested that participants purchase A Wreath for Emmett Till, a contemporary narrative poem consisting of fourteen sonnets by Marilyn Nelson. Till was fourteen years old in the summer of 1955 when he was lynched in Mississippi for allegedly trying to flirt with a white woman. The world was shocked by the horrific murder and deeply moved by the decision of his courageous mother to have an open casket at his funeral. Paperback versions are on Amazon, Google Books, etc.

Since 1976 Ruth Weinstein and her husband have been back-to-the-landers on forty acres of land in the Arkansas Ozarks. Now well into their seventies, they no longer keep goats and chickens but garden organically all year long. Ruth is also a textile artist who has made all kinds of handwoven pieces from rugs to silk scarves. Currently, she quilts and designs one-of-a-kind articles of clothing. She also makes painted canvas floor cloths.

Ruth’s writing largely reflects her love of practicing organic horticulture while surrounded by encroaching wilderness, her love of nature, community, and holistic lifestyle. She was the 2014 recipient of Dairy Hollow's “Eat! Write!” fellowship. Her poem “Marital Bickering over Potatoes” received honorable mention in the 2014-2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Competition and was published by Poetica Magazine.  Another poem, “Imagining Anthony Bourdain,” was the winner of the 2019 Arkansas Cornbread Festival’s storytelling competition, community member category, and published in the Oxford American blog. Chris Rice Cooper in her series “The Backstory of the Poem,” recently posted an interview with Ruth about her poem, “A Bone of Contention with the Ghost of John Lennon over Strawberry Fields Forever.”

Ruth’s memoir Back to the Land: Alliance Colony to the Ozarks in Four Generations was published in February 2020 by Stockton University Press. The memoir/family history links Ruth’s back-to-the-land lifestyle with the experiences of her mother’s ancestors who, with forty-two other Russian Jewish immigrant families, founded America’s first successful Jewish agricultural community in 1882 in a backwater of southern New Jersey.