Chiaroscuro: The Poetry of Memory with Tim Seibles (via Zoom)

Chiaroscuro:  an effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction on an object.

Our lives and our sense of life are made up of what we remember of lived experience. The memories that we cling to (and those that we try to forget) shape the way we approach each day. Though rarely conscious of the effort, we spend our lives constructing a library of recollections that chronicle what we’ve learned to love, fear, crave, and despise.  We imagine the future—for better and for worse—in terms of what we remember and how we feel about it.  In this workshop, we will use memory as fuel for writing.  To support our efforts to compose new poems, we will also read and discuss related works written by established poets.  This will reveal a wide range of perspectives and possibilities for our own poems.

NB: This class will be taught on Zoom and will be capped at 15 students. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. It will arrive immediately after registration so please check your spam folder if you do not receive it. It will also be sent the day before class as a reminder. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. Please email misty@writerscenter.org with any questions.

All HVWC scholarship applications will be available on Dec 1 and will be due on Dec 15 for all winter/spring 2024 classes. 

Tim Seibles is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock (1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award, and One Turn Around The Sun (2017). His latest work of poetry, Voodoo Libretto, will be published by Etruscan Press in 2022. His poems has been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Seibles lives and teaches at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.