Led by Thomas More University Artist-in-Residence Dick Hague, this program is a wonderful way to start creative writing projects and meet writers from all corners in a supportive community setting. Attend one or attend them all!

Looking at the Ordinary

January 17 | Finding the Extraordinary | Wislawa Szymborska says, “in the language of poetry of poetry, where every word is weighted, nothing is usual or normal.” We’ll launch our attempts to plunge through the ordinary to something

January 31 | Heightening Our Awareness | Leonardo da Vinci said, “An average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking.” Let’s see what we can do about that.

February 14 | That Marvelousness About Us | “The humble things that surround the body.” What lights up in your writer’s mind when you think of that?

February 28 | Where Have You Found A Poem? | “An old man tells the temperature/ by the cricket’s tick./ A boy counts the scales/ of a minnow./Nine voices sing a madrigal./An architect wonders/what she can build in an evening/of dry ragweed stems./A Cherokee and a Russian/sit down to talk of physics/in a bar in Copenhagen.” From what varied subjects, places, objects, notions can poems come from? Where do yours come from?

March 14 | The Possibilities of the Bug | What is more common and ordinary than a bug? Really?

March 28 | Work and Wonder | The ordinariness of work: can it become something marvelous?

April 11 | A Successful Work of Art | “That which creates effective surprise.” Can we make it happen with the ordinary?

April 25 | Strange, Indeed | There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. How about a little paranoia mixed into our writing about the ordinary?

May 2 | Homage to Things | In praise of things, in thanks for things and an homage for poems about things.

May 9 | We Hear From Each Other | Final read-around and celebration of what has been given to our writing over the term.