The Course: Unbearable Beauty and the Romanticization of Place
“After all, beauty has only three possible endings, and only one of them is bearable,” said the poet Larry Levis. A poet very much associated with place, Levis mythologized the beauty of the California Central Valley while also acknowledging the unbearable violence in the landscape. How can the beauty of landscape simultaneously exist with what is unbearable about it? This workshop will explore how poets have used place, landscape, and the environment to create the tenuous emotional textures, and nuanced complexities of the spaces they inhabit. Beyond the thematic discussions of place, this course will engage in critical discussions of craft, aesthetics, poetic traditions, and contemporary modes of writing in order to encourage experimentation and innovation in people’s work to extend their modes of expression into new territories. Through generative exercises, participants will have the opportunity to write and share new work for workshopping.

The Instructor: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of the collection Cenzontle, which won the 2017 A. Poulin Jr. prize, and the chapbook Dulce. His memoir, Children of the Land, is his most recent publication. His work has appeared or been featured in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, People Magazine en Español, The Paris Review, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, New England Review, and Indiana Review, among others. He currently teaches in the Low-Res MFA program at Ashland University.

Duration: This class meets once a week over six consecutive Monday evenings from 6-9 pm ET.   

Application period: Apply by August 5th.

Click here for more details about Orion Online Writers’ Workshops.