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Writers Workshops

Advanced Inprint Spring 2017 Life Writing Workshop

Thursdays Starting January 19 5:45 pm–7:15 pm running 10 weeks
Instructor: Henk Rossouw

Where

Houston Methodist Dunn Conference Center
6565 Fannin Street
Houston, TX 77030 United States
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Methodist Workshop photo 4Poetry/Lyrical Essay 


Open only to participants of previous Inprint Life Writing Workshops at Houston Methodist


This course emphasizes creativity through practice. In the belief that reading leads to writing, we will discuss in class poems and lyrical essays, then I will provide writing prompts rooted in what we have read. The goal is that the writing you begin in class will become the groundwork for new poems and lyrical essays. Thus, we will explore multiple ways to construct new work: borrowing tactics or structures from the poems and essays we read; playing with the dividing line between poem and essay; using a writing notebook as a tool in everyday life to track what you read and tease out new possibilities for material. As well as building on the techniques and forms we tried out in the fall, such as anaphora and the ghazal, we will also examine what poetry can offer the essay and vice versa. Together with a range of poetry, we’ll also look at cutting-edge practitioners of the lyrical essay, such as Annie Dillard, Susan Briante, and Robin Coste Lewis.


About the instructor

Originally from Cape Town, HENK ROSSOUW has poems in The Paris Review, Transom, The Massachusetts Review, and The Boston Review. An excerpt from his book-length poem Xamissa recently appeared in The Common. In 2009, Henk gave a reading in Times Square as one of the winners of the Poetry Society of America’s Bright Lights Big Verse contest. He’s also published personal essays in The Threepenny Review and The Chronicle Review, as well as fiction in Tin House. A former foreign correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Henk has written long-form reportage on the AIDS pandemic; as the 2005 Ruth First Fellow, he spent six months among rural doctors and healthcare workers in a small town in South Africa. After his MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he entered the PhD program at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where he serves as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast. He has been teaching Inprint courses—including personal essay through to poetry—since 2013.

To learn more about the Inprint Life Writing Workshops at Houston Methodist hospital click here. If this workshop is full when you try to register, remember to sign up for the waiting list.