Welcome to Tutka Bay Lodge Workshop

Dear Poets and Memoirists,
We're about to spend a long weekend together in one of the most beautiful places in North America! I'm very much looking forward to this workshop, as you are a most eclectic group of poets and writers, and many of you work in more than one genre.
We'll have a lovely weekend of writing, forest exploration, solitude and community (and the food, as some of you may already know) is out of this world.
To enhance our experience, I am developing this blog. The "pages" to your right open onto documents, readings, and exercises we will be doing during our time together. You may want to print this material and bring it with you, and our access to the blog during our Tutka Bay time may be dicey. I intend to leave the blog open after our time together so that we may continue to stay in touch and share our work.
So bring some work with you, and your notebooks and/or laptops and perhaps a flashdrive so we can share work.
This blog will be private and open only to participants and some staff members of the Tutka Bay Lodge, so anything you post here won't be shared with the whole world.

I'll see you on September 3rd!
Best wishes,
Carolyn

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Forche Online Workshop

Dear Poets,
    I have an opening in an online workshop at 24 Pearl St. (Fine Arts Work Center) January 16th-20th. It is both generative and critical. Here is the link, if you are interested:

http://web.fawc.org/24-pearl-street/writing-new-poems-winter
Warmest wishes,
Carolyn

Sunday, February 21, 2016

More about Greece

p.s. and this (see post below) is the link to that workshop!

writingworkshopsingreece.com

After a long time away

Dear Tutka Bay workshops writers and poets,
     Every summer, I spend the month of June in Thessaloniki and Thasos, Greece, teaching in the Writers Workshops in Greece program. There are workshops in poetry, prose, food & travel and writing & the sacred. I do private conferences there. It's quite a beautiful place, and also surprisingly affordable (for a month in Europe). Let me know soon if any of you are interested, as the workshops are soon to be filled. This is an essay written by a returning participant.
Best wishes to all of you,
Carolyn
https://www.kissfromtheworld.com/study-abroad/greece/thassos/how-a-writing-workshop-in-greece-changed-my-life-2894.html#.VseJcdkwFDg.facebook

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Post Tutka Bay

Dear most wonderful workshop,
     We saw two orcas from the water taxi on the way to Homer-- a wonderful sign! I wanted to thank you all for those wonderful days together. Now that I'm back int he fray of school, it so helps to feel that community that we were still with me, and the silence of the forest, and the eagles, and the soul-uplifting beauty of Tutka Bay.
      I'm in the midst of preparing (intensely) for the James Baldwin tribute tomorrow, but after that, I will begin posting photos and responses and all else to the blog and also making our group email list. I hope you'll forgive the delay.
    Let's stay here together...
Best wishes,
Carolyn

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Ode to Tutka Bay


O, Tutka Bay, you give us silence
and the opposite of silence:
Seashells turning eager ears toward
their teacher, the deep and brilliant sea.
Rain investigating pine needles
all night long with millions of miniature
magnifying glasses. Mosses drinking dew
with countless tongues. Mountains
like elephants, remembering
everything. This is what you give:
A yellow moon, almost full, holding
its pitted face up to the dark side of the earth,
the earth tipping its white hat to the sun
just long enough to show its hand
of Northern Lights arcing across
the whole dome of the sky
yet leaving space enough between the lines
for a tub overflowing with bioluminescent
poets, each in his or her own way,
composing odes to Tutka Bay.


                        —Dinah Berland

Questions About Form: Elegy, Ekphrasis, Larry Levis


The various topics and exercises posted by Carolyn before we met, appearing on the right side as a list of Pages, are obviously in no way intended to be rigid or exhaustive.  That said, as I read through them, I was wondering about the value of trying to write to a particular form or theme, to be part of that particular tradition or community, or for any other reason—as opposed to simply writing without concern for the “constraints” of such guides and prompts.
As an example, when I read the amazing Larry Levis poem, “Sensationalism,” posted on the Ekphrasis page, I was reminded of a poem I wrote (“Study in Subordination”)  some years back after reading a collection of Levis’s work (I think it was The Selected Levis).  I am setting it out below just to better illustrate my question.  If I were trying to fit my poem into a category, I suppose it comes closest to ekphrasis (broadly construed, written in response to, or at least in the wake of reading, a collection of his poetry, and no one poem in particular).  I don’t think that I consciously thought of it this way when I wrote it, and I suspect it would need something more or different to really “qualify” as ekphrastic, assuming there is some reason to have such a goal.  
My question really is prompted by the mental leap, the association, I made reading the Levis poem on the “Ekphrastic Poem” page shortly before reading Carolyn’s  “Poets Mourning Poets” Page.  Levis died in 1996, well before I wrote my poem.  I could as well have written Study in Subordination as an elegy (perhaps I should say, more overtly as an elegy, as I suppose it has elements or hints of the elegiac).  Maybe I would have been influenced to do so had I read Carolyn’s post of Casey Cep’s “Poets Mourning Poets” before I wrote it.
The question I am throwing out is:  Should I have?  Setting aside questions of how well I might have pulled it off, or of the merits of what I actually did write—or lack thereof—would there be some inherent value in approaching this poem with the clear intent to write an elegy?  Would it be more meaningful?  More likely to have a life (if it ever left my drawer)?  More of a contribution to some tradition we might like to feel part of as poets?  Would it (potentially) be more likely to be better as an obvious elegy, or, for that matter, if it were more consciously and clearly ekphrastic, rather than something that is neither, or hybrid? Would it be good to revise it in one clear direction or the other?
I am not looking for a critique of a particular poem (though I am always happy to hear how others respond, and have thick skin).  My aim is really to have a small discussion about the larger questions prompted by the juxtaposition of categories, themes, and forms in our Blog Pages, and what virtues there may be in being intentional about writing toward these, as opposed to giving the creative process free rein, and finding that we have become part of one of these formal traditions more serendipitously (and therefore probably less completely or “successfully”), or that we have not written something more formally identifiable.

Study in Subordination

The poetry of Larry Levis is laden
with subordinate clauses, hanging like
pregnant clusters on málaga vines
that don’t know if they’ll end up wine
or raisins, not that either is inherently
better, it just is, or isn’t,
each is other, and neither, and it

doesn’t matter, unless, maybe you
are Caravaggio, looking for diversion
from painting thieves and saints, John
the Baptist—or John in the Wilderness,
as if that body would be any less, stripped
of its name or given another
capriciously, not malevolently,
to see if names mattered—or
an apostle, incredulous and faithful,
timidly probing with his apologetic
finger into a flap of skin in the living
reliquary of Christ’s torso—presumably
a souvenir left the Friday before
by a centurion’s lance—trying to divine
the line between quick and dead, and

you think maybe you’ll switch to fruits
today, a boy with a basket of fruit to be
precise, muscular shoulder, clavicle and
neck forming an intriguing delta and peaches
you’d like to sink your beard and tongue
into, in which case you might care
if they are grapes or raisins, since raisins
won’t show up as well in a basket of painted fruit,
which already has to compete with that look
on the young boy’s face that leaves us
wondering what he and Caravaggio do
after he sets his basket down for the day,
the newest oils quieting upon the canvas, or

like—hang with me here, still in similes
for Levis-like subordinate clauses—
death, insinuating itself between each
breathing in and exhalation and in
interstices between words, between
the letters of each word, black ink soiling
yet defining the snowy solitude of each
page, as several cousins, half
the neighbors, a snare drummer and
the odd horn player line the edges
of the field, wetting their pantlegs
in the dewy night grass, spooking
the piebald mare grazing the next pasture,
headlights of their tractors and pickups
illuminating hardening furrows of
freshly disced topsoil and a final
father-son outing, a cosmic game
of rocks, scissors, paper—words cutting
snowflake patterns in folds of death,
driven snow filling chiseled epitaphs,
ashes of redoubtable death covering both
anxious snow and trembling words
like a thin down comforter.


“Housekeeping” Details


  If anyone who wants to continue discussions from Tutka Bay on the blog hasn’t discovered this yet, there is a place at the very bottom of the Home page for the blog that says, “Follow by Email,” which allows you to get a daily notification of any new blogposts.
  Does anyone with more blog experience have any tips on how to format your posts to maintain formatting—and more specifically, to maintain original line breaks in poems (to avoid having longer lines broken in ways you weren’t expecting or wanting)?
•  Does anyone know what the screen does that comes up after you hit "Publish" for a new post--the one that says something about sharing on Google+?  Does it publish your post to some larger group, beyond the Tutka Bay Retreat participants?