The Sundress Academy for the Arts hosts the Sundress Workshop Series, a series of creative arts workshops emphasizing composition, revision, and creative development. As part of Sundress Publications, the Sundress Workshop Series provide focused, personalized instruction to writers of all skill levels. Participants are treated to guidance from advanced instructors who help them to not only hone their craft but also find suitable venues for their work.

Writing Around the Wound of Estrangement

May 10, 2023, 6:00-7:30PM EST
http://tiny.utk.edu/sundress

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Writing Around the Wound of Estrangement,” a workshop led by Lindsey Danis on May 10, 2023, from 6-7:30 PM. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).

This 90-minute generative workshop will look at how we talk about estrangement and, more critically, what is left unsaid. We’ll examine the landscape of estrangement: Why do relationships fracture? Who is primarily affected? Whose voices are elevated in discussions of estrangement, and whose are silenced? We’ll use Jane Alison’s “Meander, Spiral, Explore” to consider the narrative shapes best suited to estrangement stories. What structures explain what often feels untranslatable? How do we give meaning to this wound when it requires we write about painful material, regrettable behaviors, or family secrets? We will read excerpts from Cheryl Strayed and MB Caschetta to unpack the narrative choices writers make, and what we believe this wound reveals or conceals about us. Generative writing prompts will allow writers to examine this topic in a supportive group environment. Writers will be encouraged (but not required) to share.

Lindsey Danis is a queer writer of fiction and essays on travel, nature, belonging, and LGBTQ identity. Lindsey’s writing has appeared in Longreads, Catapult, Hobart, Barzakh, and elsewhere, and received a notable mention in Best American Travel Writing. Lindsey is the creative nonfiction editor at Atlas + Alice and runs the queer outdoor travel blog QueerAdventurers. Lindsey has a BA from Vassar College, MFA from Emerson College, and is an alumni of SAFTA, Tin House and forthcoming TA at The Writer’s Hotel. Explore more of Lindsey’s work at lindseydanis.com or via Twitter (@lindseydanis) or Instagram (@lindsey.danis.writer).

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Lindsey Danis via Venmo at @Lindsey-Danis or via Paypal at lindsey.danis@gmail.com.

Summer Poetry Writing Retreat

June 2nd-4th, 2023
Firefly Farms, Knoxville, TN

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is thrilled to announce its Summer Poetry Writing Retreat, which runs from June 2nd through June 4th, 2023. The three-day, two-night camping retreat will be held at SAFTA’s own Firefly Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee.  All SAFTA retreats focus on generative poetry writing, and this year’s poetry retreat will also include the following break-out sessions: “The Cascade and the Overflow: The Use and Uselessness of Punctuating Your Poetry” and “Singing the Body Electric: Writing our Embodied Experiences.”

A weekend pass includes one-on-one and group instruction, writing supplies, food, drinks, and all on-site amenities for $250. Tents, sleeping bags, and other camping equipment are available to rent for $25.  Payment plans are available if you reserve by March 31, 2023.

The event will be open to writers of all backgrounds and provide an opportunity to work with many talented, published poets from around the country, including workshop leaders Hali Sofala-Jones and Darren C. Demaree.

Workshops

“Sex and Food: Toward A Poetics of Mess”: Rather than prioritizing methods that champion streamlining and productivity, let us celebrate the radical politics of food and mess-making as queer writing methods and joyful learning practices. Since poetry is often a genre of experimentation, the inclusion of queer mess invigorates our understanding of writing as well as how we compose our own work. When using messy modalities, we invoke the mouth as a political tool that adds delightful complexity to our poetry. We will unearth moments of joyful chaos in the works of Audre Lorde, Jose Esteban Muñoz, and Rajiv Mohabir. We will move beyond normative, ethical valuations negatively associated with both queerness and disorderliness in favor of mess-making as an accessible, equitable creative practice.

“The Cascade and the Overflow: The Use and Uselessness of Punctuating Your Poetry”: In this workshop, we will explore the strategy of punctuation in the poetic form, how it can be used, ignored, twisted and turned into what we need it to be or what we need to ignore to write the best possible poetry.

Workshop Leaders

Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University. She is the author of False Offering (JackLeg Press 2023). She is the co-founder of Honey Literary, Inc. and the Poetry Editor at Split Lip Magazine. Her poems can be found in CALYX, Copper Nickel, the Offing, Poet Lore, and Vassar Review.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of eighteen poetry collections, most recently the luxury (Glass Lyre 2023).  He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal.  He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry.  He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

All participants must be vaccinated and present a negative COVID test taken within 24 hours of attending the event.

Space at this workshop is limited to 14 writers, so reserve your place today!

Trans/Nonbinary Writing Retreat

June 9th-10th, 2023
Zoom

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is thrilled to announce its Trans/Nonbinary Retreat, which runs from Friday, June 9th through Saturday, June 10, 2023. This event will be entirely virtual held via Zoom.  All SAFTA retreats focus on generative writing, and this year’s retreat will also include the following craft talk sessions: “Queering the Lens: Trans Ekphrastic” and “The Poetics of Addiction: Imagery, Symbolism, and Juxtaposition in Writing Alcoholism.”

The event will be open to trans and nonbinary writers of all backgrounds and experience levels and provide an opportunity to work with many talented authors and poets from around the country, including workshop leaders jason b. crawford and Remi Recchia and keynote speaker Ina Cariño.

Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner with an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, the Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and is the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2021, Ina was selected as one of four winners of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest.

jason b. crawford (they/them) was born in Washington DC and raised in Lansing, MI. They are the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz and an MFA candidate in poetry at The New School (‘23).

Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a PhD candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and Book Editor for Gasher Press. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared in World Literature Today, Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand / Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021) and Sober (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022) and the editor of Transmasculine Poetics:

Filling the Gap in Literature & the Silences Around Us (Sundress Publications 2024).

The total cost of attendance is $75. To apply for a fellowship, please send a packet of 5-12 pages of writing (poetry, fiction, or nonfiction) along with a brief statement on why you would like to attend this workshop to safta@sundresspublications.com no later than March 30, 2023. Winners will be contacted mid-April.

Space at this workshop may be limited, so please reserve your place today.

How to Make Any Fiction Subgenre Your Own

June 14, 2023, 6:00-7:30PM EST
http://tiny.utk.edu/sundress

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “How to Make Any Fiction Subgenre Your Own,” a workshop led by Alex Difrancesco on June 14, 2023, from 6-7:30 PM. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).

This free virtual workshop puts forth a simple formula for genre-hopping–or for creating “speculative fiction” that takes elements of genres including sci-fi, horror, literary, and others. The formula will be put forth in the lecture section, expound upon the research of tropes and ways to both take them literally and push back on them. Examples will be used from literature, including Octavia Butler’s playing with the “grandfather paradox” in time travel literature in Kindred (the trope had, until that novel, dictated that you cannot go back in time and kill your grandfather because you would cease to exist, and Butler’s take was “Well, what if your grandfather was a slave owner who raped your grandmother, his slave?” The outcome, as we know, is a brilliant book).

We will discuss how to research tropes, choose the ones that benefit the stories we wish to tell, push back on ones that leave our particular demographics out, or are often used against us in stereotypical ways. We will discuss “literary fiction” not as a default or desired genre, but as one of many genres that we should also feel free to research and use to our own personal ends in creating the stories we want. After discussing lists of potential tropes for each genre, students, during the interactive writing section, will be encouraged to research deeper for ones that resonate with the story THEY want to tell. After writing, we will share both our research and what came out of it in terms of writing

Alex DiFrancesco is the author of Psychopomps, All City, and Transmutation. Their work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Tin House, and more. Their novel All City was the first book by a transgender writer to be a finalist for the Ohioana Book Awards in 2020, and they are a recipient of the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award for 2022.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Alex Difrancesco via cash app is $AlexDiF or Venmo is @alex-difrancesco.

This workshop is brought to you in part by a grant provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission. Find out about the important work they do here.

 

Mythologizing Our Climate Futures

July 12, 2023, 6:00-7:30PM EST
http://tiny.utk.edu/sundress

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Mythologizing Our Climate Futures,” a workshop led by Ashia Ajani on July 12, 2023, from 6-7:30 PM. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).

This workshop will use climate writing and art by members of the African Diaspora to inform young people’s own climate narratives. This workshop is designed for writers who are interested in developing their use of imagery. This workshop will use African and Caribbean mythology to understand how different diasporic people have interpreted natural disasters and climate impacts for millennia, and what we can learn from these myths.

We will also look at the art of Eddy Kamaunga Illuga, whose imagery around colonization and the exploitation of African nations under capitalism and the climate crisis holds powerful insight for understanding how apocalyptic conditions have plagued the African diaspora in an anti-Black world. Participants will leave the workshops with written drafts, ancestral knowledge, and environmental futures.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Ashia Ajani via Venmo @ashiainbloom, PayPal through ashiaajani22@gmailcom, or CashApp at $Ashiainbloom.

Ashia Ajani is a Black storyteller hailing from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains, and the unceded territory of the Cheyenne, Ute, Arapahoe, and Comanche Peoples. Ajani is a 2022 Just Buffalo Literary Center Poetry Fellow, and a Pushcart Prize nominated poet and writer with words in Atmos Magazine, Sierra Magazine, Frontier Poetry, and World Literature Today, among others. Ajani received their Master’s in Environmental Management from Yale School of the Environment in 2021. Their debut poetry collection, Heirloom, is forthcoming in the spring of 2023 with Write Bloody Publishing. Follow them on the socials @ashiainbloom or on their website.

This workshop is brought to you in part by a grant provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission. Find out about the important work they do here.