This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House.
Mapping Your Poems
“The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop…it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.”
—Michel Foucault
In this generative writing intensive, we’ll begin with a word, phrase, or line from a book of poetry we’ve brought with us. We’ll read poems that openly—or subtly—respond to other poems. Then, we’ll use a mapping exercise to capture the colors, feelings, temperatures, tastes, plants, animals, and images our chosen lines evoke. From there, we’ll begin our own poems.
Throughout the weekend, we’ll alternate writing with short meditations, walks, and audiovisual prompts that participants can incorporate into their own writing practice. The borrowed lines may remain visible in the finished poem or disappear entirely, serving only as the seed or scaffold that got it started. On the second day, participants will workshop the poems they’ve developed.
By the end of the intensive, students will leave with a new poem and a generative process they can return to whenever they need a way into the next one.
Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in Houston. Four Way Books published her first and second collections of poetry, In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame (2019) and The Certain Body (2022). After Hours Editions published her first collection of poetry in translation, Equestrian Monuments (2022) by Luis Chaves co-translated with Samantha Zighelboim. Guez is currently translating La Mano Suicida by Maria Montero. Poems, essays and translations have appeared or will soon be forthcoming from IMAGE, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, POETRY, The Guardian and PEN Poetry Series. For her work, Guez has been awarded a Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Fulbright Fellowship, a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Inprint Restrepo Americas Translation Prize. Guez holds degrees from Rice and Columbia. She is currently an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor and SCRIPTS Fellow pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
