2 workshops in Toronto — an old favourite and new adventure!

I have two poetry workshops scheduled for the near future, both in Toronto. One is a workshop I've been running and honing and morphing for nearly a decade — Stuart Ross's Poetry Boot Camp. The other is a new workshop, inspired by my recent poetry book, Our Days In Vaudeville, which contains collaborations I wrote with 29 other Canadian poets — In Collaboration. The focus of both workshops is on producing new material and exploring new strategies for making poems.

Here are the details:


STUART ROSS’S POETRY BOOT CAMP
Sunday, February 23, 10 am – 5 pm (45-minute lunch break)
Christie/Dupont area
$95 includes materials and snacks
Spaces are limited: register now by prepaying. Write razovsky@gmail.com.

This relaxed but productive workshop for beginning poets, experienced poets, stalled poets, and haikuists who want to get beyond three lines is a Toronto institution! Poetry Boot Camp focuses on the pleasures of poetry and the riches that spontaneity brings, through lively directed writing strategies. You will write in ways you’d never imagined.

Even if you’ve taken the Boot Camp before, you’ll be introduced to many new adventures in poetry. I have a lot of fresh strategies up my sleeve!

As always: arrive with an open mind, and leave with a squirming heap of new poems!



IN COLLABORATION: A WORKSHOP
Sunday, March 30, 10 am – 5 pm (45-minute lunch break)
Christie/Dupont area
$95 includes materials and snacks
Spaces are limited: register now by prepaying. Write razovsky@gmail.com.

My latest book, Our Days In Vaudeville, contains poems written in collaboration with 29 other Canadian poets. Writing it was an exhilarating experience, because collaboration means taking part in poems that you could never have written on your own — and becoming part of a fused consciousness!

In this workshop, we will explore at least a dozen different methods of collaboration. We will write in pairs, as a group, and we will even learn how to collaborate with ourselves. This promises to be a lively day in which you may cooperate in one poem, and then do battle in another — but it is also a day in which you have total license to experiment and explore.



WHAT PARTICIPANTS HAVE SAID ABOUT PAST WORKSHOPS
"Atmosphere is generous, open, light-hearted — great workshop! And a wonderful way to spend a Sunday."

"Really good at sparking off ideas and learning techniques for generating new poems and moving forward."

"The atmosphere was completely relaxed & enjoyable, yet completely focused on the activities. Really enjoyed it & found it extremely informative."

"Permission to experiment, acceptance, support. Thank you for an inspiring day — much appreciated."

"Great fun. Great atmosphere. Thought-provoking."

"An excellent assembly of techniques & lots of time to try them…"

"Constant writing — generating a lot of new material. Strategies that incite me to turn things upside down."


ABOUT ME
Stuart Ross is a writer, editor, and writing coach who has been leading workshops for two decades across the country. His most recent books include Our Days In Vaudeville (w/ 29 collaborators; Mansfield Press, 2013), You Exist. Details Follow. (Anvil Press 2012) and Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew (ECW Press, 2011).

Stuart has been shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award, the Alberta Book Award, and three times for the ReLit Prize; his story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books, 2009) won him the coveted ReLit ring in 2010, and his novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew took the Mona Elaine Adilman Award for Fiction on a Jewish Theme as part of the prestigious J.I. Segal Awards. In 2013, his poetry book You Exist. Details Follow. received the only prize given to an Anglo writer by l’Académie Litteraire au Tournant du 21e Siècle.

Stuart was Fiction & Poetry Editor at This Magazine for eight years, and is editor at Mansfield Press, where he has his own imprint. Books he has edited have been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize (twice!), the Governor General’s Award, the Toronto Book Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Gerald Lampert Award. He was editor of David McFadden’s What’s The Score?, which won the 2013 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize. Stuart lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

Over and out.