Last week I attended a poetry residency/workshop at Maine Media in Rockport, Maine. I was lucky enough to work with the amazing Nick Flynn and it was a week filled with writing, revising, poetry, and friendship.

On Sunday evening, after a brief welcome and review of the week’s schedule, I met with Nick Flynn and the other four poets who would be in my workshop for the week. We went around the room and introduced ourselves. I stated I’d finished my MFA in January and my full length collection would be published in March 2020. Nick interrupted, “Wait – you finished your degree in January and you already have a book deal? It took me ten years to publish my first book!” And thus began my week of poetry.

Nick Flynn and I

Every morning we met for three hours and wrote, using prompts Nick brought in and pieces of writing we all shared. I was writing 2-3 poems a day and while to a fiction writer this may not sound like very much, any poet will tell you that 2-3 poems a day, even bad poems, is a huge accomplishment.

I became fast friends with both the poets in my group, and the poets studying with the other instructors, Richard Blanco and Tina Chang — seriously, this workshop had some powerhouse poets in their lineup! If you’re looking for a great week-long poetry residency/workshop I highly recommend checking out Maine Media.

We ate meals together (including a lobster dinner on our last night!), wrote and went to readings together, offered feedback and friendship. It was wonderful.

Poets eating lobstah!

Maine Media offers other workshops too – in film, photography, videography, and book arts. Because they offer these things they were kind enough to open the studio to the poets and let us play with the letterpress.

Letters!

It was so awesome, if I had a garage and a lot of extra time and money I would buy a press to play with it. Instead, I took advantage of it at Maine Media and did a letterpress of the title of my forthcoming full length poetry collection: Beautiful & Full of Monsters.

Setting it up!
Look at how pretty that is!

After doing the title of my collection, I did a line from the first poem in the collection, titled Forest Fire.

from Forest Fire

I was so enamored with the process that I think I’m going to do a few broadsides of a poem or two to sell during the launch of my book next spring. Stay tuned for further details!

All week Nick had us writing from different prompts: pictures and news articles, poems by other poets and even using some of our own, older poems as inspiration. Then we took everything we’d been writing and started breaking it apart and putting it together in a new way. It was creative, it was physical, it was unlike any poem creation I’ve ever attempted. And it yielded a pretty good poem, one that took leaps I might not have ever attempted otherwise. I’ll share it with you soon, I promise.

Working on poems: my poem in the foreground, Nick Flynn in the background

At the end of the week we had an evening where we all gathered – each poet reading one poem they’d written that week, the photography students showing off their pictures, the film students showcasing their work. It was a wonderfully supportive, creative environment. I can’t wait to go back.

Poets. Plus a land shark.