Cracking Shells

Invariably, my favorite part of any workshop has been the community that gets formed throughout  the semester. The inside jokes, the unique intimacy, an understanding of peers that can only come from picking apart their writing. The vulnerability that comes with sharing your art leads, inevitably, to a sense of trust and camaraderie. So while I was stoked, this spring, to learn from a poet I greatly admire, I was disappointed that the workshop would last only a week. Too short a time, I thought, to develop that kind of bond. Of course, I was wrong.

Danez Smith came into the room, so overwhelmingly themself, so comfortable and ready to begin. There was no academic veneer, no stuffy posturing, no attempts to mute their personality. They had us laughing, and, on the first day of passing out poems--to the left--had us singing “Irreplaceable.” A chorus of “To the left’s” erupted, and the energy in the room was light, lively, accepting. Now, it takes me a while to warm up to people. I hold a lot back. (A friend has said of me that it takes a while to crack the shell, but once you do, you find “a pretty weird fucking bird.”) Point is: I’m reserved, upon first meeting people. But Danez Smith had me, on that second day, table-drumming and belting Beyonce. If that’s not a testament to their teaching ability, then the rest of this blog post better convince you.

It wasn’t just the affability or realness that Danez brought to the table. They forced us to reconsider our relationship with language, to step outside the comfortable. For one assignment, they had us list the poetic strategies we rely on, and a second list of all the topics that appear in our work, and then had us write poems in which we abandon those crutches. Writing those poems felt like stepping out expecting a stair, and tripping awkwardly down. Eventually, though, I found my footing, and was able to see language from an entirely new angle. Defamiliarizing myself with my language allowed me to enter a fresh, generative space. By the end of the week, I felt rejuvenated, closer to writing than I had in awhile.

Danez spoke passionately about language, life, community, and communication. The lack of pretense, the lack of a professorial guise, the complete absence of a fake-self, allowed them to speak directly to us, to the point. The cliche I'm about to offer you is that they taught me not just about writing, but about being. Their parting bit of advice for us writers, the last wisdom they imparted, was a small phrase that I don’t think I can hear enough. “You want to be a writer? Then write. Just write.”

Aiden Baker is a first year MFA candidate in Fiction at FAU. Originally from Chicagoland, she now lives, writes, and sweats in South Florida. You can find her work in The Ninth Letter Web Edition.

The Annual Poet Invasion of Delray Beach

For 15 years in a row, Miles Coon and his wife Mimi have brought poets from all over to Delray Beach. It is a week-long event of workshops, craft talks, readings, and bonding over a love of poetry. The Palm Beach Poetry Festival creates a space for poets who might be seeking their first publication to work with and alongside poets who may be finishing a manuscript and writers looking to train in a new form. There are hundreds of participants who work in the same workshop group all week, taught by some truly incredible poets, and some of us are lucky (or perhaps naive) enough to volunteer our time to help for the week.

Florida Atlantic University is a short 20-minute drive from Old School Square in Delray Beach, where the festival takes place. Thanks to the proximity of our campus, Florida Atlantic University MFA students make for the ideal volunteer interns for the Festival. There were four of us from FAU this year—Caitlyn GD, Colton Martin, Kelsey Moghadospour, and myself—along with some students from Florida International University’s MFA program and some independent volunteers both local and from far away. The diversity amongst volunteers matches the diversity of the Festival faculty.

I was lucky enough to work with two poets in my workshop, Jessica Jacobs and Nickole Brown (and their sweet golden retriever, Solace). Our workshop group progressed so much from our first meeting on Monday through the end of our time together on Saturday. What really made the experience worth it to me was picking up great tools for my own writing and getting some new methods for my teaching. Plus who doesn’t want to hang out with poets like Laureanne Bosselar, Sharon Olds, and Tyehimba Jess for a week? It’s a lot of work, but it’s something I’m already looking forward to next year. In the workshop time, I was able to compose two new poems and got inspiration for some assignments for my Teaching Creative Writing course. I also made some great friends from FIU, got closer with my FAU cohort, made connections with staff from some journals and presses, and bonded with my workshop faculty. Jessica, Nickole, and I have been eagerly making plans to meet up in Portland at AWP later this month. Volunteering is never easy work, but it is a vital part of being a model literary citizen. I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to be a part of the PBPF this year.

Kelsey Allman is a first-year MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She earned her BA in Writing & Linguistics from Georgia Southern University. In addition to writing creative nonfiction, poetry, and tweets about football, she is working on a graphic memoir about mental illness. Her dog Remington controls most of her life decisions.