Writing Workshop: Dividing Your Time, All the Time: ways to incorporate your desire to write into any time with Dara Barrois/Dixon—May 28, 2024

Everyone of us wonders how to find time, to find the cracks and crevices, ruptures and openings where writing and thinking can happen in all circumstances. Sometimes we have to make them. We have to imagine them. Sometimes they are there all along for us to see. The time we have together will be to find the time—the time that will keep a place in our brains awake to possibility, one thing we all need to write. We will make time in our time together to write some, talk some, and share some tried and true means to write no matter what. 

Families, friends, jobs, work, day-to-day chores, habits, everyday obstacles, social obligations, school, commutes, train and plane and bus rides, waiting in line, and so on, all hold opportunities to practice what we need to keep alive intentions, desires, passion, and will to write.

Bring with you paper or laptop, or other means by which you put words down for others and yourself to see.

Bring, by someone else, one short poem or paragraph you admire and one page of your writing you'd like us to hear and see. Seeing your writing in public goes a long way to letting you see it as others might see it.

Bring one page of notes, to share in our conversation, concerning how you imagine finding time to write what you would like to write, and a list of places, things, people, situations, etc. in which you can imagine finding time. 

Dara Barrois/Dixon's books include Blood Hook & Eye, The Book of Knowledge, Hat on a Pond, Voyages in English, You Good Thing, Reverse Rapture, in the still of the night, Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina, and the brand new Extremely Expensive Mystical Experiences for Astronauts. She’s taught poetry workshops and seminars across the US, at University of Pittsburgh, Hollins University, University of Alabama, University of Utah, University of Massachusetts–Amherst, University of Montana, University of Texas at Austin, Santa Fe Writing Conference, Aspen Writing Conference, Emory University's Summer Writing Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, which she founded in 2006 at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Her poems have been awarded The Poetry Center Book Award, American Poetry Review's Jerome Shestack Poetry Prize, and supported by Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowships. She founded factory hollow press which focuses on chapbooks. She lives in factory hollow in western Massachusetts. She formerly published as Dara Wier.