The poet Mary Oliver famously said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” In this workshop, we will practice paying attention as a pathway to deep inquiry, courage, imagination, and devotion. We will read selected poems from a range of contemporary women poets who draw, at times, on biblical personas—Sarah Ghazal Ali, Traci Brimhall, Nan Cohen, Isabella DeSendi, Carlie Hoffman, Marie Howe, Jessica Jacobs, Carlene Kucharczyk, and Mary Szybist—whose writing is courageously awake to the world and their own faith-fueled, and often doubt-fueled, movement through it.
Through in-workshop exercises and reflection on our own creative process, this workshop will encourage you to deepen your own inquiry into the worlds (yes, all of them!) you inhabit. In particular, we’ll explore the affordances of writing through a persona–religious or not–to investigate personal history, the (oft-fragmented) self, and daily encounters as sites of discovery, doubt, and devotion.