Poet Cecilia Woloch to teach the workshop, “Deep Waters, Sturdy Craft” at Lake Logan

Who: Poet Cecilia Woloch 

What: "Deep Waters; Sturdy Craft" Workshop & Retreat for Writers, September 15 - 21, 2014

Where: Lake Logan Retreat Center, Canton, NC - 40 miles West of Asheville 

Enjoy seven days  of refreshment for your creative spirit while immersed in an intensive poetry workshop with internationally acclaimed poet Cecilia Woloch.

Supplementary to the workshop are nature walks, fire circles, mindfulness sessions and movement sessions. Massages can be scheduled in  the late afternoons. Participants will stay in charming private cottages and cabins on the 85-acre  lake, with rocking chairs on the back porches and vistas of wilderness and serenity.

Poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen said, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.” Where have you not gone, yet, in your writing — that place that seems beyond language, perhaps, but that language might take you, still?

This workshop will focus on using the craft of poetry to move into deeper waters in the creative process, in order to achieve both precision and depth in our writing. Suitable for those just embarking on a creative journey as well as for accomplished, practicing poets who are searching for new sources of creative energy and new challenges, the workshop will be geared toward exploring both the mysteries of the creative process and the discipline of the writer’s craft. Workshop participants will read and discuss the work of master poets for inspiration, then engage in a series of generative writing exercises designed to take each poet toward deeper sources of material and new approaches to using language. 

They will share that work with one another and offer feedback on revision aimed at bringing the writing to its fullest fruition. The workshop environment will offer a safe place for creative risk-taking and a rigorous but compassionate community. Participants will work together with an awareness of and a respect for each writer’s individual voice and unique vision, also helping each writer to clarify that vision and look toward the body of work that might emerge from the individual poems. They'll replenish the creative well each day and then dive back into it, refreshed, replenished, emboldened to go farther still, to do their truest, most authentic and most compelling creative work.

Cecilia Woloch is an NEA fellowship recipient and the author of five acclaimed collections of poems, most recently Carpathia (BOA Editions 2009), which was a finalist for the Milton Kessler Award, and Tzigane, le poème Gitan (Scribe-l’Harmattan 2014), the French translation of her second book, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem. Her novella, Sur la Route, is forthcoming from Quale Press in 2015. Recent awards include the Indiana Review Prize for Poetry (2014). The founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and The Paris Poetry Workshop, she has also served on the faculties of a number of creative writing programs and teaches independently throughout the U.S. and around the world. 

For more information about this Cullowhee Mountain Arts sponsored event, click here.