may, 2023
Event Details
This workshop leads participants through a series of writing exercises exploring the role that prepositions and directions play in the processes of grief and healing. Much of the time, the language we use assumes a linear and time-bound process that doesn’t match our complicated experiences of grief. Together, we’ll write to find more productive angles in which to view and move through loss.
Alysia Nicole Harris, Ph.D. is a poet, linguist, international performer, arts writer, and charismatic follower of Jesus. She is the author of the chapbook How Much We Must Haved Looked Like Stars to Stars, a collegiate and youth poetry slam champion, and founding member of the spoken word collective The Strivers Row. Alysia has performed in over 20 countries and now lives in Corsicana, TX where she serves as Scalawag‘s Arts & Soul Editor-At-Large. She received her Ph.D. from Yale in Linguistics and her MFA in Creative Writing from NYU.
Grief, like good poetry, isn’t linear. It’s rarely straightforward, often confusing. It circles and lifts, eddies and fades, then comes back all the sudden to punch you in the gut when you least expect it. Sometimes it’s furious, sometimes persistent, and sometimes even sweet.
Most of language fails us when it comes to grief, which is why we need a practice of reviving the basic tools we have to talk about what we’ve gone through, are still going through.
Poetry can be that practice: messy, personal, reaching, revelatory.
For National Poetry Month, Scalawag takes our grief and other loves on the road; We’re hosting writing workshops with poets across the South to create spaces we can gather in community where we can struggle to find the words together.
