Mining the News for Poetry with Sonia Greenfield

Join us for this generative workshop where we will turn to current affairds as a jumping off point for making poems. Whether we’re looking at breaking headlines or human-interest items buried deeper in media, opportunities abound for connection. Every day, the world churns and offers up its stories–how do we synthesize the overwhelming nature of the human condition? Empathy is the glue that connects us a poets. Let’s use it to tap into news items and turn them into poems — poems that link the public to the personal and the personal to the universal.

Class meets in person Saturday, May 30, 10 am – noon.

Class size: Minimum 5, maximum 15.

Member discount: Members of Write On receive a 10% discount on all classes and workshops. To become a member, please click here. To receive the discount, members must log in to the website using their unique password and enter member10 in the promotion code box. The code is case sensitive.

Teaching Artist: Sonia Greenfield was born in Peekskill, NY, and has lived in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and most recently, Minneapolis, where she shares her home with her son, husband, and two rescue dogs. She has worked as a college professor, bartender, television producer, barbershop shampoo assistant, and once appeared as a dating show contestant. She has a deep enthusiasm for dogs, children, dance parties, mountains, detective fiction, 80s New Wave, fussy bourbons, and the NYT crossword puzzle. An activist and political volunteer, Greenfield has been the director of The Southern California Poetry Festival and editor of Rise Up Review. She knows how to throw an amazing dog birthday party, complete with peanut butter cake and the neighborhood parrots as guests, and she can decorate a child’s birthday cake to look like a real aquarium populated with sharks. That’s four sheet cakes stacked. To-scale. Greenfield is tenderhearted and believes in the inherent goodness of humans while also understanding that they can convince themselves, through a series of mental acrobatics, that good is bad and vice versa. Above all, she believes that kindness can be a neutralizer for many character flaws.