CLASSROOMS

Craft Cafeteria: Essentials

$35 per session, or $125 for all 4

Each week in Craft Cafeteria: Essentials, we’ll focus on tools which are the ones I think are most important to use with intention. I’ve designed this course for beginning poets who are just beginning to experiment with using craft to underscore meaning, as well as for poets who have been using these worn tools for years, but who’d like to brush up their skills.

Each week, we will look at 2-3 poems each week (which everyone will get in advance). I’ll share a few craft thoughts, and make some observations about each individual poem, then I’ll share two prompts for the week ahead.

There will be time for group discussion and observations, questions and recommendations.

*These are LIVE via Google Meet. 

8/21 Week 1: The House of the Poem: Line breaks, stanzas and white space

9/3 Week 2: Prominent places: Titles, last lines, first lines

10/2 Week 3: Within Reach: Extension, activation and gesture

11/21 Week 4: Music: Soundplay, rhythm and repetition

12/8 Week 5: Read-around and Closing Notes (included in registration for any/all weeks)

*Always 7:30-9:00 p.m. Eastern Time

Climate Catastrophe & the Writer’s Task

A Generative Workshop

with Nickole Brown

Tuesday, December 3, 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. Eastern Time

$50*

*Live on Google Meet. This workshop will be recorded.

If we take the climate crisis at hand seriously—and in this lonely age potentially bereft of our fellow creatures—how can we help but feel an incapacitating sense of hopelessness that threatens to render things like poems useless? In this intensive, we’ll strive together to find ways past this debilitating hurdle. We’ll ask questions that instead of silencing ourselves will urge us on: How might writing allow us to move through the trauma wrought by these storms and fires and floods? And how might we bear witness to the devastation of our communities, much less depict the suffering of non-human beings? How might one avoid the pitfalls of producing work that is flat-lined with facts, or, worse, rendered incapable of communicating from our grief and rage? Ultimately, what is our responsibility as creatives to this epoch? What impact can we make with our words? We’ll study poems that have their own solutions to these challenges and will try our hands at writing through this darkness with awareness, control, and yes, even hope.  

All of the instructor’s proceeds will go to a scholarship fund for the Hellbender Gathering of Poets. Funds will help cover student tuition for our inaugural gathering this coming October 2025 in hopes of making the week-long workshop accessible to as many participants as possible. 

Nickole Brown

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. She’s President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October 2025.

*Self-guided courses are ready when you are! Independent poets determine their own start date. Writer’s Groups should come to an agreement about what date you’d like to begin.

Tarot Poems

*Asynchronous, Wet.Ink

$350, 9 week course, with Sarah’s comments on 4 poems *limit 12 seats,

Wednesday, September 25 – Tuesday, November 26

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$275 Writers Group, 9 week course *3-5 members per group

Group votes on start date.

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$225 Independent, 8 week course

Start when you’re ready.

Each week we’ll explore a different aspect of the tarot (history, suits, major arcana, ritual, layouts, relationships, and more), and read 1-2 source texts by authors who explore these themes. The readings will be paired with a brief experiment to guide you into the prompt, and help you “draw out” images unique to the deck you choose. Every week will also include optional viewing/listening assignments to provide multiple entry points into new work. You’ll be encouraged to post your fresh drafts if you like for light criticism and positive peer feedback. By the end of class, you’ll have 7-8 fresh drafts and a number of fun ways you can use the Tarot in your writing even after the course has ended.

Haunted Poems

*Asynchronous, Wet.Ink

$275 Writers Group, 8 week course *3-5 members per group

Group votes on start date.

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$225 Independent, 7 week course

Start when you’re ready.

 In this generative workshop, we’ll write poems of our haunted-ness and hauntings, of people we’ve ghosted and the ones that haunt us, places we can’t return to and the ones we can’t leave, items we’ll never get back and things that seem to multiply or re-appear no matter how many times we try to get rid of them. We’ll use prompts with model texts by poets Kristina Marie Darling, Dana Levin, Lisa Sewell, Helen Ivory, James Wright, Shane McCrae and Joy Harjo, paired with optional short listening/watching assignments to open up a different way to summon/speak to our ghosts. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have 6-7 newly drafted poems.

Very Superstitious: Poems of Everyday Magic

*Asynchronous, Wet.Ink

$275 Writers Group, 9 week course *3-5 members per group

Group votes on start date.

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$225 Independent, 8 week course

Start when you’re ready.

In this class we’ll write lucky charms, invent horoscope poems, divine lines from oracle card readings, and take inspiration from everyday magic. Each week we’ll read 1-2 source texts paired with a brief example text from the folklore focus for the week. We’ll write new poems born out of a prompt linked to that week’s topic. Every week will also include optional viewing/listening assignments to provide multiple entry points into inspiration.

Muse as Dryad

*Asynchronous, Wet.Ink

$275 Writers Group, 9 week course *3-5 members per group

Group votes on start date.

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$225 Independent, 8 week course

Start when you’re ready.

is class we’ll write poems from the lungs of the earth, each week approaching the woods from a different angle. We’ll consider their science, and explore forest folklore and fairy tales. We’ll end in contemplative eco-poetry and with celebration. Each week you’ll write new poems born out of a prompt linked to that week’s topic, inspired and informed by resources provided for the sake of  multiple entry points into inspiration.

Hygge Poems

*Asynchronous, Wet.Ink

$275 Writers Group, 9 week course *3-5 members per group

Group votes on start date.

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$225 Independent, 8 week course

Start when you’re ready.

In this class, we’ll write ourselves into the concept of hygge, leaning through our lines into the pumpkin spiced coziness of Fall. We’ll write seven to eight poems inspired by anchor texts by poets who lean into this Swedish concept, which spread during the early pandemic, when all of us were seeking a little more comfort. We’ll use prompts and course readings to inspire new work using hygge’s core tenants to strengthen our creative resilience even after the season has passed. 

January Jumpstarts

Monday – Friday, 2 weeks
1/6 – 1/11 and 1/13 – 1/18
9 a.m. – 9:15 a.m. Eastern Time
$50 / $25 for 1st Time Jumpstarters

2 weeks of live Google Meet jumpstarts with prompts, quick-writes and a pdf full of extras to recharge your daily writing routine.

*Join us for all or just a few of these sessions! Everyone who registers will receive the pdf with prompts and extras at the end of our two weeks together.

Sarah note: If the reduced rate would enable you to join us, please use that link. No questions asked! <3