upcoming retreats

EXCAVATION: WRITING THE BODY WITH INTENTION

To be a writer is to acknowledge your place in the world and the place you have created inside of your own life. Poems and prose aren’t born in a vacuum—inevitably, everything we make connects to something that came before it: decorating the bones of an excavated ancestor. And it’s impossible to have these conversations without including the body. 

Our bodies house all of our memories, poems, and organs. Many of us have complicated relationships with them, or have difficulty looking at them with tenderness. When the body reveals itself in our art, it’s not always intentional—or it is, and we don’t know how to negotiate it. 

In Excavation: Writing The Body With Intention, we’ll make the body the subject of our poems rather than a ghost lingering in the background. We’ll talk about the role bodies play in our art and how we can address their presence with care and purpose. Through this process, we’ll investigate where our trepidations towards writing the body with honesty come from, and how we can move past them.

​

Photos from our lodging venue in Minneapolis are included beside this description.