Screw the Rules—Let’s Just Write: A Workshop with Kari Gunter-Seymour

Screw the Rules—Let’s Just Write

This workshop will provide fodder for inspiration, innovation, expression, ingenuity, and allow for outright rabble-rousing and merry-making, by setting aside basic “writing rules” and simply allowing ourselves to freewrite_—without specified forms, self-scrutiny, or inhibitions. A series of prompts will be provided to help jumpstart our brainpower, paired with brief writing intervals. Time will be set aside for group sharing and discussion, during which we will most certainly discover how naturally metaphor, repetition, alliteration, assonance, rhyme—in other words “music”—will infiltrate our work all on its own if we give it a healthy space to grow and thrive. Extra points will be given for bad handwriting and misspelled words.

About The Workshop Leader:

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio. Her current poetry collections include Dirt Songs (EastOver Press 2024) Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022), winner of the Legacy Book Award and Best Book Award. She is the executive director and editor of the Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak anthology series. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, World Literature Today, American Book Review, The New York Times and Poem-a-Day.