This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House.
If this workshop is full when you try to register, please sign up on the waiting list here so you receive priority registration the next time this class is offered.
Writing through the Confetti Time
This workshop is tuition-free and only open for K-12 educators.
Both writing and teaching require time, energy, and attention. The work of caregiving has often produced what writer Melissa Stephenson calls “confetti time” – fractured moments, rather than the long stretches we sometimes think are necessary for deep creative work. Similarly, K-12 educators, with increased demands on their time, often face the same challenges. But do writing and teaching have to be in competition, or are there ways that the two can inspire and feed one another?
In this generative open genre workshop, participants will be introduced to several strategies that can help sustain a writing practice while also teaching. The workshop will draw from essays and poems from the forthcoming anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, and how those pieces engage different aspects of writing and teaching. We’ll discuss how these challenges surface in our own writing lives and participants will be offered generative prompts and time to write. The workshop will include time for participants to share their drafts, compare experiences, and brainstorm directions for future writing. Participants will leave with the kernels of a couple pieces of writing they’re excited to keep working on and strategies to help sustain that momentum.
NANCY REDDY is the author of Pocket Universe (LSU, 2022); Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series; and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). With Emily Pérez, she’s co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (UGA, 2022). Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, Romper, Brevity, The Millions, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University in New Jersey.
