Autopoetic Essay with Máighréad Medbh
Info
Date: January 22, 2025
Time: 6.30 pm - 8.30 pm
Duration: 7 weeks
Level: Intermediate |
Cost: €241 (€217 Members)
This course will take place online on Wednesdays (seven sessions in total).
Course Summary
A series of workshops for writers who want to try a combination of poetry, prose and research. Many of the more innovative contemporary writers use this combination. ‘Autopoetic essay’ attempts to perform a life situation in text. We begin with an experience, event or question we wish to explore, and the text evolves through a combination of felt sense, poetic technique and concrete investigation. The resulting text may comprise poems, personal narrative, essayistic discourse, fictional elements, cultural-historical criticism, and may use several media. The workshops are both theoretical and practical, looking at models for the method, with exercises in situ.
Participants need to have some previous writing experience and familiarity with poetic structure.
Course Outline
Session 1: Introduction to the process. Focus on identifying the core subject matter.
Session 2: Poetry and some of its structures. Practical exercise in poetic technique.
Session 3: Poetry in narrative combinations; examples. Sharing of Work in Progress.
Session 4: Essay methodologies. Sharing of work in progress.
Session 5: Research methods and resources; applying research.
Session 6: Editing, publishing. Sharing of work in progress, discussion.
Session 7: Sharing of work in progress and group feedback.
Participants will be encouraged to begin writing from the first session. The process will involve three strands, which will develop simultaneously: a. deepening a sense of the subject matter in order to find the best approach and structures; b. researching the various contexts; c. writing the text, drafting, experimenting.
Course Outcomes
Participants will become familiar with the possibilities and methods of ‘autopoetic essay’, and will be encouraged to produce at least a coherent draft.
Máighréad Medbh is a poet, essayist and performer with nine published books from 1990-2020. Her ecological verse fantasy, Parvit of Agelast (2016), was shortlisted for the 2017 Pigott Prize. In 2013, Dedalus published her prose work, Savage Solitude. Máighréad has been published in many Irish and international journals and anthologies, and holds a PhD in creative writing from DCU, awarded 2024. She has given many workshops for all ages, including a long-running Form in Poetry series for Fingal Libraries.
