With poet Sarah Ghazal Ali!

Often in creative writing spaces, we are discouraged from being repetitive or hyper fixated on a subject. But when I think repetition, I think ritual. I think return. Forget tension—what pleasures might lie beneath the familiarity of a revisited subject or image? How might repeating ourselves actually help us discover something new?

In this workshop, we will explore the engine of obsession: we'll lean into repetition in new and unexpected ways. As a group, we'll read some examples of poetic obsession, and then go through an exercise mapping repetition in our work. The workshop will conclude with generative writing toward a new draft.

About the Instructor: Sarah Ghazal Ali is a poet, teacher, and editor. She is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Stadler Fellow and recipient of The Sewanee Review poetry prize, her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and other publications. She is the poetry editor for West Branch and an incoming Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College. 

* *This workshop will take place on Zoom.**