How to Write Grants, Get Sponsorships
and Have Your Art Support You-
a workshop taught by Gary Glazner
Saturday December 8th
10:00 am ­ 1:00pm
CCA¹s Digital Classroom
$30 members/$35 non-members/$25 students (with ID)

In this workshop, poet Gary Glazner shows how he connects poetry/writing/art with community, how art can be of use to the world we live in. Gary uses as examples his poetry tour for Pontiac to promote a new car, his providing staff training for the Santa Fe Opera on the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, and being a poet-in-residence at a hotel and putting poems on the guests' pillows. This workshop is based on Gary's book “How to Make a Living as a Poet.” Gary draws on his experience as the Founder of the Alzheimer's Poetry Project to show how writing and art can work in healthcare settings. In this workshop you will learn how the skills you have developed as a poet, writer, artist can translate to the world at large. You will get proven tips on how to write winning grants and sponsorship proposals. You will learn how to write proposals to work with nonprofit and for profit businesses, universities and museums. You will come away with usable ideas to bring your art to life.

Theatrical Slam-etry Telling ­ for Youth
Workshop with Regie Cabico
Wednesday, October 10
4:30 pm ­ 6:30 pm
in CCA¹s Digital Classroom
$30 members/$35 non-members

In the age of digital storytelling's popularity, we will subvert the technology and resort to using our bodies and an ensemble to illustrate our poetry through improvisation, signs, drawings, rhythm & song to illuminate the word. The first half of the workshop will be develop dramatically charged slam texts, poetry & monologues and exploring the elements of a good solo performance. We will begin to look at these works as Broadway show stoppers, two minute plays as the Chicago Neo-Futurists & New York Neo-Futurists practice in Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. The latter half of the workshop will discover the "visual" adaptation before an audience.

Writing from the Pulse: Using Rhythm To Make Language

This workshop is designed to produce unselfconscious language by subordinating words to rhythm. Not quite automatic writing, this technique seeks to shape our premeditated images and ideas into finite and limiting patterns of beats and rhythms. A series of exercises will force us to twist and turn, to match concepts with sounds, and to surprise ourselves by letting language bubble up through simple musicality. Like infants who vocalize the cadences and tonalities of language before they have the words, we will begin with a landscape of sounds and pitches, stops and starts, and then color it all in with the verbal material that fits.

We will begin with a basic prosody exercise, writing couplets of iambic pentameter according to an agreed-upon theme, then using these couplets to construct a "group sonnet."

Next, we will identify familiar rhythmic patterns from pledges, poems or songs we have recited since childhood, and we will write pieces that exactly mask the rhythms and cadences of those pledges, songs, or poems. This often turns into an exercise in parody, which can be a lot of fun. It's also an easy way to get a feel for letting the rhythm dictate the language.

Finally, each poet will select a specific sheet of music with a set of beats and rhythms and fill in the language accordingly. Once we have constructed our own pieces, we will share them with the group, paying special attention to the degree of coherence or incoherence that the process seemed to foster. If time allows, we can repeat this exercise by writing according to an agreed-upon theme and then overlaying our beat structures to form a kind of collaborative, rhythmical work.

Note: While some of the beats will be provided in simple, musical notation, no one is expected to be a music reader.

The Power of the Word:
A writing-intensive workshop with Wanda Coleman
Saturday, September 8
10:00 am – 1:00 pm
CCA’s Digital Classroom
$30 members/$35 non-members

Acting as a "writing surgeon", the author of 18 books of poetry and fiction will 1) analyze and evaluate the writing issues and techniques of her students within the context of her own, completely, for the first time, ever˜(aka trade secrets), 2) offering insights into her meditative process, and specific craft matters, and 3) discuss approaches to the value of publishing poetry, and publishing in general, based on a 30-year exploration of the mercurial nature of Literary America as she has experienced it.

A Different Kind of Writing Class:
a workshop taught by Bob Holman
Friday August 17th
1:00 pm ­ 5:00 pm
CCA¹s Media Lab
$30 members/$35 non-members

Do you have something to say, but don't quite know what is the best way to communicate it? Do you need to write for the sake of self-knowledge or catharsis, but aren't sure if you want to make it public? Did a friend, teacher or other professional writer call your writing a mere journal entry? or a song lyric? Did they say your poetry rhymed too much, or maybe not enough? That hip hop is poetry, or that it's not? Did they say your prose was too poetic, or had too many ideas and not enough characters? Are you frustrated that the writing they often claim is better than yours doesn't really speak to you? Do you believe your writing may very well be able to better the lives of others? Do you dread when a microphone looms in front of you or have you never faced the mic? Do you think that performance cannot be learned, or improved, or that it doesn't matter?

If you've answered yes to any of these questions (or if they're beside the point, and you are interested in some lively literary dialogue), this is the workshop for you. Taking each student's writing and/or performance pieces as its starting point, this workshop encourages students working in varying different genres. We will explore a range of stylistic options including poems, manifestoes, creative non-fiction, dialogue pieces, song lyrics, poem-paintings, texts that redefine or de-define genre, hybrid texts or non-poetry, slam, performance, hip hop, spoken word, poetry videos, hypertexts. By the end of the class, students can expect a deeper understanding of the creative process, of the performance process, as well as the business of publishing or other ways of making their work public.

Note: This class is intended for all levels.

Mining the Past
Patricia Smith
Saturday August 18th
10:00 am ­ 2:00 pm
CCA¹s Media Lab
$30 members/$35 non-members

We'll begin by drawing a detailed map of the earliest neighborhood you can remember. From that point, we will mine the past, seeking the history we've paved over, writing our way into events we thought we'd forgotten--and those we wished we could. This is a workshop designed to generate not only work that is new, but work that is revelatory.