Ordinary Sorcery: The Everyday Magic in Resisting Metaphor with Julian Guy

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Editor's Note

Ordinary Sorcery: The Everyday Magic in Resisting Metaphor with Julian Guy
Sunday, September 13
12 PM – 3 PM PT / 3 PM – 6 PM ET
Online

Calling all spellcasters! Feeling stuck in a tiresome voice, genre, or writer’s block? In this generative writing intensive, we will challenge ourselves to write without metaphor by studying the ordinary and exacting language poet Marie Howe says, “hurts us.” Through in-class prompts and exercises accessible for all genres and levels, we will write to artworks in the public domain and works of contemporary poetry that reinvigorate and hone our language. A metaphor often averts our gaze from the very thing we seek to describe. In this craft intensive, we’ll dissect the nuance of metaphor and when it is a curse instead of a spell.

Studying works by Kwame Opoku-Duku, Jack Gilbert, Pablo Neruda, Thiahera Nurse and more, we will perfect the craft of utilizing metaphor in writing. We will also examine how unassuming language can unlock masterful and emotional world-building, and how utilizing sensory description instead of metaphor can build more compelling and complex characters. By learning to bear witness, our fundamental approach to descriptive writing shifts. Participants will leave class with new connections to their work and new writing. While taught primarily with poems as source text, all genres are welcome and will find something meaningful here. Together we will unlock the ordinary magic of everyday life and become sorcerers of our own writing.

Scholarship
The scholarship for this intensive has already been awarded.

BIO: Julian Guy is a trans/queer poet and educator whose debut manuscript, In the House Where I Love You, was longlisted at YesYes Books and named a finalist for the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize. A 2024 McCormack Writing Center Reading Fellow, his poems appear in Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, Sundress Publications’ anthology of Transmasculine Poetics, QUEERLINGS, Catapult, and more. His work has been supported by The Constance Saltonstall Foundation, MVICW, the Surprise Valley Writers Conference, and more. When he’s not plucking seashells up from the surf or teaching a workshop with the Onondaga Public Library, find him online at julianguy.com.