Craft Class with Spark Central

Along with Erika Meitner and Geffrey Davis, Keetje will teach a craft class on the topic of “Reinventing the Poem of the American Family” as part of their stop at Spark Central in Spokane:

We all know that families can be messy. But while poets have long put words to the page in an attempt to explore those complications, we have sometimes been more reluctant to set fire to the traditional models of parental devotion or childhood trauma that writers often make use of when engaging with the topic. How do we breathe new life into such old stories? Whether caring for elderly parents or raising adopted children, these narratives remain utterly familiar while their settings, voices, and structures have never been so varied or new. In this craft class (led by Keetje, Erika Meitner, and Geffrey Davis), we’ll take dynamite to the traditional models of how we write about family, employing such techniques as irreverence and mysticism as we attempt to not only explore but also explode our notions of how to write a poem about family. You’ll walk away with several new drafts of poems, as well as exercises that can be used again and again in order to re-engage your own writing about family.