“Somewhere beneath this poem,” writes Victoria Adukwei Bulley, “is the one you sat down to write.” What lives in the space between said and unsaid? How do our inherited narratives and embodied truths unfold in many kinds of quiet on the page?

In this workshop, we will look at poems from Bulley’s transformative debut collection Quiet to think about quiet as technique, quiet as form, and quiet as the body’s logbook. The session will include close reading, discussion, and writing exercises.

Where do we end and where does the world begin? How are our beings marked and complicated by their inherited histories? In this workshop inspired by poems from Alycia Pirmohamed’s collection How To Split Water, participants will experiment with writing that seeks to dissolve the borders between self and other, land and body, matter and spirit, reaching across forms towards a more numinous, transcendent kinship.

In this workshop, we will look at the rich metaphoric potential of water and explore the themes it comes to represent in poetry.