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Rooted with Mindy Nettiffe: A Four Week Poetry Workshop
May 6, 2021 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
$150About this Event
About the Author:
Mindy Nettifee, PhD is a poet, artist educator, depth psychology researcher, and somatic practitioner. She is the author of three full-length collections of poems – Sleepyhead Assassins (Moon Tide), Rise of the Trust Fall (Write Bloody ), and Open Your Mouth Like a Bell (Write Bloody) – and the how-to book on writing poetry, Glitter In The Blood (Write Bloody). Her latest work is her doctoral dissertation research Voice as Embodied Sense: Rethinking Voice and Language in Trauma Healing (ProQuest). She is a three time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, a Powell’s Books Indie Press Best Seller, and has been a featured storyteller on The Moth podcast. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon where she produces and hosts for Back Fence PDX and Artists Repertory Theatre, teaches for Literary Arts, and offers creative coaching and depth somatic work in private practice, specializing in trauma healing and the voice.
About the Workshop:
Poetry is a boundary-dissolving genre without conventions or set rules – except those we invent or adopt-as-necessary on a poem-by-poem basis. Anything is allowed to happen in a poem. This makes it an ideal vehicle for mental, emotional, and imaginal exploration – we can expand our attention toward anything that arises in our field of awareness and relate to it with words. We can stay near-sighted or get far out. We can give no fucks or all of them. We can haiku or be epic. We can be drawn into trance-like states of flow or agitated emo intensity. If we stay with it, we can reach territories of meaning where the mercury of language discovers new forms, surprising satisfactions, exquisite failures.
All of this makes poetry a radical, capable, psychedelic medium and – potentially – a pretty unpredictable and ungrounded practice. In this online workshop, Dr. Mindy Nettifee will guide experiential somatic meditations and writing practices that help us tap states of grounded connectivity and artistic containment. One of our aims will be to deepen our understanding and appreciation of our own unique creative process and how to reliably support and access it. Another aim will be to write new work inspired by root themes and rootedness: the-great-underneath, the underworld, ancestors and histories, invisible connections and interconnections, what gave and gives rise to us, what feeds us, what stabilizes us and makes it safe for us to reach.
This workshop is appropriate for writers at all levels. It includes three weeks of live Thursday evening lecture, discussion, and guided writing time on May 6, 13, and 20. After taking a week off for poem gem polishing, the workshop culminates in a live online show on Thursday, June 3 where participants can share their work and celebrate each other.
Dates: May 6, May 13, May 20, and June 3
Time: Thursdays, 6:00-8:00pm PDT