Family stories can help create the path into a greater understanding of our individual and collective history. Often they document a relationship to place, and create windows into the past for both current and future generations. In this generative workshop, poet and teacher Pauletta Hansel will help participants to choose stories to mine for their personal and cultural significance, and to craft poems from them in such a way that they are not (or not only) a chronological telling, but have emotional and symbolic resonance for both writer and reader. Each of the first three weeks we will consider several examples of poems that use story to do this work, and participants will have the opportunity to create and share drafts of their own. In the fourth week we will each share one poem for constructive group feedback.
Pauletta Hansel’s books include Will There Also Be Singing? (Shadelandhouse Modern Press), poems of witness and protest; Heartbreak Tree (Madville Publications) which won the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award; and Palindrome (Dos Madres Press) winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. Understory: A Women’s History of Appalachia is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky. She was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate and 2022 Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County Writer-in-Residence.
"Pauletta is both a master storyteller and a terrific teacher!"
"Pauletta was a wonderful instructor. She opened up the genre of memoir, and I’d love to take another class with her!"
"Pauletta's extensive knowledge of the subject and her gentle, sincere, and positive guidance was truly a life-changing experience. She made sure everyone was welcome and got to speak. She encouraged questions. She's such a skilled and caring teacher."
