What better time than Valentine’s Day than to read & write some Love Poems & Stories in a supportive, fun environment!
Love Poems & Stories: weekend class taught by Karen Paul HolmesExpressing love can be a joyful experience for the writer… and also a challenge. Come discover your voice: humorous, romantic, matter-of-fact, or all three? Karen will provide her favorite poetry and prose samples, writing tips, prompts, inspiration, and time to write about your spouse, partner, grandchildren, other family members, pets, or fictional characters. Find encouragement, laughter, and a little Folk School magic — whether you’re already writing or itching to begin. All levels, all genres welcome (memoir, creative non-fiction, fiction, blogging, poems, etc.)
Karen Paul Holmes is a freelance writer and poet who won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her poetry books are: No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin, 2018) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich, 2014). Her writing has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and The Slowdown, and has appeared in numerous literary journals including Diode, Gargoyle, Pedestal Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Plume. Holmes also leads adult creative writing workshops and has served on panels at conferences such as AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs). She founded and hosted Writers’ Night Out for the North Carolina Writers’ Network and has hosted the Side Door Poets in Atlanta for more than 14 years.
Here’s an example of one of Karen’s love poems (as a “prose poem”):
To My Husband on Our First Anniversary, 2021
In my floral robe, wrinkled and faded as a dishrag, dragging my 67-year-old self down the stairs to the living room where you’re pressed and dressed and have already calmed clients on the phone, but now you’re singing Here comes my baby--that bright-eyed bushytailed thing you do each day. It could be too much, this boosting me into morning. But I laugh, can’t be a cranky rusted gate because, well, those sea blue eyes, your rosy beam, arms unfurling peony-like, (and I, the ant burrowing). Plus French press you’ve kept warm for two hours and the oven ready to bake frozen biscuits. Like you do, I want to make tenderness a daily sacrament. Love is, wise ones remind us, also a verb, and I thank you for your patience while I practice. I want to verb you like you verb me.
this and more love prose poems here: http://www.portyonderpress.com/karen-paul-holmes---3-poems.html
