Poetry:
Lori Jakiela’s seminar
will address “Where I’m Calling From: On Cultivating a Poetry of Place.” Where
we are, where we came from, where we imagine ourselves to be: place is central
to our identity and it can be central to our poems. In this interactive talk,
we’ll discuss place as landscape, as memory, as culture, as a rich and palpable
source for meaning, metaphor, insight and more. We’ll find ways to re-see a
poem as its own landscape and open ourselves to constructing poems that are
free to navigate as they please. We’ll read some writers of place, dive into
the rich well of first memories/first places, and do writing prompts designed
to take us back to those places that, as Camus would say, first gained access
to our hearts.
Lori Jakiela is the
author of the poetry collection Spot
the Terrorist! (Turning Point 2012), as well as the memoirs The Bridge
to Take When Things Get Serious (C&R Press 2013) and Miss New York
Has Everything (Hatchette 2006). Her third memoir, Belief Is Its Own
Kind of Truth, Maybe, is forthcoming from Atticus Books in 2015. Her work
has been widely published in magazines and newspapers, including the New
York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Creative
Nonfiction, The Rumpus, and Hobart. She has been nominated for the
Pushcart Prize many times, this year for her essay-in-vignettes, “Free to a Good Home,” published in Superstition Review.
She teaches at Pitt-Greensburg and Chatham University and lives in Trafford
with her husband, Dave Newman, and their children. For more, visit
http://www.ljwritesbooks.com.
