Muse & the Marketplace 2019

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking, wrote Paul Valery, and in this session we will explore how prose writers can pick up a few dance moves from poets. By looking closely at the stories and memoirs of poets such as Gregory Pardlo, Beth Ann Fennelly and Natasha Tretheway, we will consider what it means to pay attention to music and imagery, form and figurative language, and how we can apply these tools to the worlds of fiction and non-fiction. Through a mixture of lecture and guided writing exercises, participants can expect to leave this session writing prose that sounds anything but prosaic.