Forms & Features with Oliver Brickman

All are welcome to a poetry discussion and creative writing workshop, “Doorways: Demystifying Poetic Turns,” created and led by Oliver Brickman.

No poem is complete without a moment of surprise or transformation. But how do you write without knowing what you’re writing? In this class, you’ll practice building doorways, tunnels, and hinges to follow the poem to its own metamorphosis. You’ll learn a set of strategies and experiments to help you uncover the hidden possibilities in each stanza, and generate material using strategies like Leaping, the Volta, Trap Doors, Bulldozers, and Breaking the Fourth Wall. You’ll leave with renewed trust in yourself and your poetic instincts, and a deeper understanding of how to build moments that make a poem extraordinary. Bring one or two poems-in-progress that feel flat, confusing, or just too simple.

Oliver Brickman is a queer Jewish writer and performer invested in liberatory futures and reckoning with ghosts. The winner of the Split This Rock Poetry Prize, they have also received support from the Lambda Literary Foundation, The Yiddish Book Center, 4Culture, Artist Trust, and The Bloedel Reserve. A BOAAT Writers Fellow and Ken Warfel Fellow for Poetry in Community, you can find their work in Narrative, Adroit, The Indiana Review, and On the Boards' Performance Lab. Oliver holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and lives in Seattle, where they work in a library and teach writing to youth and adults.

To allow for more poets to participate in workshops with Visiting Teaching Artists, participants will be registered for the September workshop with Sarah Ann Winn or the October workshop with Oliver Brickman. This program is for adult participants, aged 18 and older.

Closed captioning is available via Google Meet. We are happy to provide ASL interpretation. Please let us know at least one week in advance, if possible, if you would benefit from an ASL interpreter in attendance. If you would benefit from any other accessibility measures, please contact us by emailing [email protected]. Learn more about Google Meet’s built-in accessibility features here.