Session Registration for 2024 Online Retreat

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Saturday, October 5

11:00am – 12:00pm EDT: Rosemerry Whatola Trommer Keynote, The Art of Not Being Good

How do we create an environment for creative practice in which people feel safe enough to discover and share their most vulnerable, open-hearted, authentic selves? How do we nurture a creative community that instills a deep sense of belonging? What might we tell each other if we knew the other wouldn’t look away? In this one-hour keynote, join poet, teacher and performer Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer as she invites you to think about and practice the skills necessary for leading writing groups that invite participants to show up exactly as they are.

1:00 – 3:30 pm EDT: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer Masterclass, Sorrowom

Sometimes, in our most desperate moments, we find an impossible invitation—the invitation to praise. How can this be? How, in our most desperate moments, can we celebrate some aspect of life? And how, is it possible (?), can we celebrate the desperation itself? In this two-and-a-half hour playshop, join poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer as we talk about the paradoxes we live into through creative practice. We’ll read poems that do the impossible—find praise in the midst of suffering—and converse about them, leap into our own writing, talk about process, and have time for optional sharing.

4–5:30pm Eastern: Choose Your Preferred Session

With so many lit mags and journals publishing short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and mixed-genre work, finding the right fit can feel daunting. Learn about literary venues—including submission strategies and tracking tools—during this panel Q&A with Barbara Krasner, Suzanne Rancourt, Alexis Collazo, and Tina Egnoski. Facilitated by Nicole R. Zimmerman. A resources list (New Pages, Poets&Writers, Duotrope, Chill Subs, Submittable, Submitit, lit mags mentioned) will be provided.

An interactive session where workshop facilitators imagine and develop the design for a new writing workshop, including writing the first draft of marketing copy and getting feedback.

Let’s look at some list essays together and explore how they can help us tackle challenging material, add humor, play with the second person voice, employ sensory detail, and find new ways in when we are feeling stuck. We’ll try our hands at our own list essays, and we’ll leave with new prompt ideas, new tools to share with our groups, and a few tricks to try on our own when we are grappling with overwhelming material, or when we want to spark new ideas for writing.

I won’t be able to attend this block

5:30 – 6:30 pm EDT: Meet & Greet

AWA Board Member and Retreat Chair Mary Simmerling will be hosting this informal meet up, where you’ll have space to chat and connect with fellow workshop leaders.

Sunday, October 6

11:00am – 12:30pm Eastern: Choose Your Preferred Session

This stimulating workshop will explore narratives that go beyond the traditional hero’s journey. Other more inclusive, expansive, and collaborative paths have been identified by scholars, each encompassing their own character arcs and distinct beats. To gain a deeper understanding of how aspects of these narratives exist within our lives—and how they can be used for our projects—we’ll write with a number of engaging creative and expressive prompts. We’ll also experience a taste of SoulCollage® (no artistic background required), using our creations as inspiration for a piece of uplifting writing that will serve our own steps along life’s journey.

AWA offers the Caregiver Project to help those in a caregiving role build resilience and community. These are one-off and four-week online writing workshops for those who are or have been in a caretaking role, professionally or personally. This panel with the organizers of these events will illuminate how to create offerings for specific populations and how to gather data about the effectiveness of the AWA Method to promote wellbeing for writers.

Your query and submission cover letters create an editor’s first impression of you and your professionalism. Bring your draft letters to this clinic and by the end, you’ll have a version you can send out.

I won’t be able to attend this block

1:00 – 2:30pm Eastern: Choose Your Preferred Session

Creating Occasional Poems. Create a personal poem to share with someone at any event, on the spot! Turn a few minutes of conversation into an affirming and intimate poem, mirroring a person’s story in the AWA Method … Great gifts for birthdays, special celebrations, and wonderful fundraisers.

You’ll leave this collaborative session with several creative ideas on how to advertise your writing workshops, find new writers, and you’ll learn how to use Canva (a free online graphic design tool) to help bring your ideas to life.

In this session, participants will curate their raw material written in AWA sessions and learn the tools they can use, such as storyboarding, to stitch swatches into a full, cohesive story fabric.

I won’t be able to attend this block

2:45 – 4:15pm Eastern: Choose Your Preferred Session

Some AWA facilitators are nervous when talking about poetry. We’re good at metaphors and the sound of language—that’s pretty much the same as for prose—so what’s different? Line breaks! This talk will go over the major kinds of line breaks and why they’re used so you’ll feel comfortable commenting about them.

Join this hands-on workshop where you’ll learn how to leverage B12 AI to create a professional website. This workshop will guide you through the process of generating a customizable website, providing tips on how to edit and personalize it to reflect your unique brand and vision. By the end of the session, we will have created a fully functional website ready to launch and many of the skills needed to maintain and update it.

In this 90 minute session, we will discuss the importance of being able to see ourselves as characters on the page. In other words, what craft tools do we need at our disposal in order to write our younger selves with compassion, curiosity, and complexity? Discussion will pull from the prose of various established memoir writers, including Vivian Gornick, Natasha Tretheway, Joan Didion, and Javier Zamora.

I won’t be able to attend this block

4:30 pm EDT: AWA Town Hall

The AWA Board will fill you in on our initiatives and new offerings. We’ll also seek input from you about what your priorities and goals for the organization are.

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Session Registration for 2024 Online Retreat

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Saturday, October 5

Sunday, October 6

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