Practices of Assembly: Compiling Your Poetry Manuscript
Workshop: Practices of Assembly: Compiling Your Poetry Manuscript
Instructor: John Sibley Williams
Date: Thursday, June 5
Time: 12:00-2:00pm Pacific (3:00-5:00pm Eastern)
Price: $25 (payment options – Stripe / PayPal / Venmo / CashApp)
Are you interested in organizing a chapbook or poetry manuscript? This intensive manuscript workshop will teach participants different ways one can begin to compile a poetry manuscript. Expect to view manuscript samples and discuss techniques that can be applied to the process.
We will explore all the ins-and-outs of organization and publishing a chapbook or full-length, from writing toward a given theme to setting and keeping to creative deadlines to learning how to submit smarter, not harder. Poets will be guided through a series of lessons and hands-on activities that each focus on a different aspect of creating, structuring, and finally publishing a new collection.
Topics include selecting the best title, focusing on your first and last pieces, finding the thematic threads in your writing, organizing the entire collection so that it reads smoothly, deciding which structure works best for you, and submitting individual pieces to magazines and the book as a whole to publishers and contests.
Learn how to:
- Set writing goals and make creative action plans
- Make your work stand out
- Get more acceptances…and faster
- Submit smarter, not harder, to both journals and presses
- Discover the thematic threads in your writing and how to weave them across a collection
- Reshape previous poems to fit the themes and style of your collection
- Order poems within a manuscript for cohesion and flow
- Write powerful introductory and closing poems for your collection
- Choose the right book title, poem titles, and epigraphs
About The Workshop Leader:
John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), skycrape (WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems isforthcoming in translation from by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A thirty-five-time Pushcart nominee, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, Poetry Editor at Kelson Books, andfounder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.