News & Thoughts

I’m delighted to get back to teaching for Writespace Houston, a non-profit writing center that offers outstanding courses and workshops on all kinds of writing. There are scholarships available for every course! 

All of my courses and workshops take place on Zoom, so you can take them from anywhere you have an internet connection. They’re also on Zoom because we’re still in a pandemic, and I am immunocompromised. I’ll post registration likes when they’re available–probably mid-October.

Creating the Poetry Chapbook: a six-week course

November 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, December 7, 6-9 pm

From first poem to final publication, this workshop takes you through the ins and outs of writing, organizing, and sharing poetry in the chapbook format. Chapbooks, which have their origins in early modern Europe, are small collections of poems or prose poems of no more than forty pages. Often centered on a theme, chapbooks are an excellent way of sharing and promoting your poetry. Over the course of this workshop, we will discuss selecting a theme, explore resources for writing, write poems and discuss them together, talk about ways of organizing the poems in the chapbook, and consider different methods of publishing. Some previous experience writing poetry will be helpful, but not required. We’ll be working with Matthew Salesses’s book Craft in the Real World to help guide us in our workshop; I’ll provide scans of the material we’ll use the most, but having a copy on hand isn’t a bad idea.

Poetry in the Palm of Your Hand: a one-day workshop

Saturday, Nov 12, 9:30 – 12:30 pm

Poetry doesn’t need to be long to be profound or funny or beautiful. Discover the joys of writing short poems in this one-day workshop. We’ll talk about using limited forms like haiku to help us be more creative, and how to create an entire scene or mood in just one short stanza. We’ll find inspiration in everyday objects, tell stories in short works, and explore rhyme, meter, and free verse. Writers of all levels are welcome.

Gentle All-Genre Generative: a one-day workshop

Saturday, January 14,  9:30 – 12:30 pm

Wondering what to write right now and how? Finding it hard to process the pandemic and all of the surrounding turmoil? This gentle, restorative workshop will use writing exercises and prompts to help you re-center and enjoy writing again during and after a very difficult time. All genres are welcome, from non-fiction to poetry to speculative fiction to memoir—or explore a different genre in each prompt! Over the course of this three-hour workshop, we’ll talk about the pandemic and its effect on us as writers, our fears and hopes, and what it means to practice writing. We’ll use several ideas for writing exercises from Natalie Goldberg’s classic Writing Down the Bones to get re-accustomed to writing without self-censoring, to encourage writing with intent, and to have fun writing playfully. We’ll share our in-workshop writing and talk about presenting new work with confidence. Writers can be of any experience level; feel free to bring works already in progress or simply come ready to renew your love of writing in a supportive, affirmative environment where all creativity is valued and celebrated.

This Friday, August 19, I’ll be speaking as part of a roundtable discussion on/with scholars who have become part of and/or continue to access the history profession from the “outside,” broadly construed. The session is hosted by the Coordinating Committee of Women in History, which is a FABULOUS organization that also provides fellowships for research, an online writing community, and much more. Come join in! Here’s their official announcement:

The CCWH mentorship committee is pleased to announce a new professional development series, made available by a generous grant from the AHA. The series would include e-sessions and virtual workshops on topics relevant to our membership. Meetings will be held on Fridays at 1pm EST/noon CST/10am PST.

The first session, “From the Outside”, will be held Friday, August 19th at 1pm EST. This will be a roundtable discussion with a panel of scholars who have entered the history profession from the “outside” – broadly construed.The term is purposefully broad and meant to include a myriad of different backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints. 

Unlike many of our other events, this will be a very open discussion that welcomes anyone who relates to doing history “from the outside,” be it from another discipline, industry, or from outside of academia, or from a different place, experience, or background. The session will discuss barriers, issues of imposter syndrome, and other topics in a Q&A format, and will welcome input and questions from attendees. Our panel consists of historians who cover just a handful of these, and hope that we will get plenty more viewpoints and participants from the audience.

The speakers include:

Kendra Preston Leonard: a musicologist and music theorist whose work focuses on women and music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and music and screen history. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive. The author of six scholarly books and numerous articles and book chapters, she is a frequent guest speaker on music history, music and gender, research techniques and methods, and maintaining a scholarly career outside of academia. 

Stefanie Shackleton: an early career historian whose research focuses on class, culture, and gender in the nineteenth-century British Empire. She is currently a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. As a first-generation and non-traditional student and academic, she has been active in mentorship and advocacy efforts that seek to make higher education equitable for all students who wish to pursue it. Stefanie is also the Mentorship Coordinator for the CCWH.

Adrienne Sockwell: a writer, archival researcher, and interdisciplinary thinker, with a focus on developing a public history practice that partners with history museums, archives, and cultural heritage institutions. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in History at the University of Texas at Austin and works as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, TX.

The link for the August 19th session is available here: When: Aug 19, 2022 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) 

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0kf-CvpzMuE9DbcDXjY0C9i53Ytt4bAsHD 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Today, Sage Cigarettes published my poem “Witchcraft for Cellists.” Here’s a little note about it.

When I was 10, I began playing the cello in a public school music program. I had private lessons, then attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts for my last two years of high school. I got my Bachelor of Music degree in Cello Performance from the Peabody Conservatory, received a Certificate of Advanced Studies from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and returned to the US to do my Master of Music degree at the University of Miami. I specialized in new music and wanted to make a career in new chamber music in particular. But starting even before I went to UNCSA, I’d had pain in my wrists and arms. It didn’t seem to be tendonitis or bursitis; it didn’t respond to physical therapy or heat or cold or acupuncture or chiropractic or massage and the hand surgeon said that the nerve damage wasn’t bad enough to warrant carpal tunnel surgery. I tried taping my wrists, wearing fingerless gloves in practice, taking on exercises that should have strengthened any weak muscles. One instructor suggested I needed a smaller instrument, a 7/8 size cello, to accommodate my smaller hands and short fingers; another had me completely overhaul my technique. This latter approach led to my much-improved playing but not and end to the pain, and as I approached the end of my MM program, it was clear that I was probably not going to be able to continue playing as a professional. I had to face the potential anger of one parent, who was one of those people who insisted at success at any cost; and the worries of the other, who felt that my music-heavy education had prepared me for nothing but grinding poverty. I felt guilty and ashamed and at the same time relieved that I could stop trying to overcome the pain. I enrolled in a PhD program for musicology. I played a few times in public after that, but soon stopped playing altogether. I was first diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which my doctor thought had been present since I was very young and that had flared when I had Lyme disease. More recently, my neurologist and rheumatologist have given me diagnoses of mixed connective tissue disease and lupus. These are chronic autoimmune diseases. No taping or heat or physical therapy will fix my hands and arms. 

“Witchcraft for Cellists” began as a theatrical piece in which I wanted to write about my career as a cellist and its ending and the traumas associated with playing and my education as a musician and how I found myself to be much happier as a scholar and writing texts for the new music I’d once hoped to play. But the piece I was trying to write was too painful, ironically, to write. It still is. I doubt now that I will write much about that period of my life, although it sometimes comes out, a tiny bit, in my creative work. So I changed tacks. “Witchcraft for Cellists” was fun to write. I got to think about some of the pieces I’d played and how they might fit into a magical landscape, and how ritual is part of all musical practice. If you try any of the spells, let me know how they work for you.