Big Blue Marble Bookstore’s “On Sundays We Write” continues with Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach on the ways parenting supports and informs our writing.

Balancing writing and parenting is no easy task, but one that makes us better parents and writers. Has your writing become consumed by your role as a mother or father, by the way your child sees the world, and the way you see the world through your child? What makes poetry such a fitting vessel for the experience of parenthood? Within both lyric and narrative, parenthood's intergenerational quality complicates temporal movement as well as the voice of a singular “I,” bridging present experience with a legacy of mother's and father's past and the futurity of our children. In this workshop, we will explore and access our personal diverse backgrounds, the histories that motivate us as parents and writers, and discover how parenthood is more than the subject matter of our writing, but an integral element of craft—the poetics of parenthood.  

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Julia is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize, forthcoming from Kent State University Press in the fall of 2019, as well as the chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her newest poems appear in POETRY, Nashville Review, TriQuarterly, and Waxwing. Julia is the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine (www.constructionlitmag.com) and writes a blog about motherhood (https://otherwomendonttellyou.wordpress.com/).

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On Sundays We Write continues with Devin Kelly and “Too Much is Just Enough: Allowing Excess in Poetry.”

So much of the workshop process is about cutting material, to the point where many writers think that revision means excision. Though this is obviously true in certain instances, and learning how to assess and cut your own work is a necessary skill to build as a writer, not much is said for the ideas of excess and permission. When do you allow yourself to say more as a writer? When do you allow yourself to be “too much”?

This workshop will focus on building our ability to give ourselves permission to write into excess. It will focus on excess of all forms — length, content, subject. We will go together into whatever has been deemed impermissible and explore what it means to write into that. We will study poems by Chen Chen, Terrance Hayes, Jess Rizkallah, Larry Levis, Hannah Rego, and Steve Scafidi. We will also work on writing exercises that focus on giving ourselves permission to be “too much.”

Through careful study, discussion, and writing, we will leave this workshop with more faith in our ability to revise, not as a practice of excision, but as an active practice of re-visioning — re-visioning our approach to writing without restraint, fear, or self-consciousness.

DEVIN KELLY is the author of In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen and the co-host of the Dead Rabbits Reading Series. He is the winner of a Best of the Net Prize, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, LitHub, Catapult, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and more. He lives and teaches high school in New York City.

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Explore and create "found poetry"--words gleaned, captured and juxtaposed from song lyrics, recipes, newspaper headlines and other existing texts. We'll look at several forms of found poetry, including collaged pieces and "blackout" poems, then make our own with magazines, old books, scissors, glue sticks and imagination. Teens and adults welcome!

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Anndee Hochman is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Working Mother, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Literary Mama and Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers. She writes frequently on topics of education, health, family, arts and culture. Hochman is the author of two books: "Anatomies: A Novella and Stories" (Picador USA, 2000) and "Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home" (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1994). Hochman also teaches creative writing to children, teens and adults in settings that include schools, senior centers, detention facilities and writers' conferences. She is the creator and teacher of Heart & Craft, a memoir workshop for women that takes place every other year on Mexico's Pacific coast. Hochman lives with her partner and daughter in Philadelphia.