Instructor: Gloria Monaghan
Monday - Thursday
June 29 - July 2
9am - 12pm
4 sessions

In the elegant design of the natural world, we can unlock our inner spirit by writing poetry. Students will use journals to record everyday observations and dreams, to explore the unconscious mind. The workshop focuses on synchronicity and everyday signs to build poems and craft new awareness. Every class begins with a meditation to focus intent and clear away distraction. We meet outside weather permitting. Students are given prompts as tools for transforming ideas and words. We will study poems, genre, style, and experiment with form. The workshop is open to new and experienced poets. We will work on poems that come from dreams, and signs that come to us in our natural waking life. The transcendentalists believed that signs in nature are meant to guide us individually. We will use this concept to shape new poems and rework old poems. Using meditation and concentration on symbols from nature, students will be given prompts to write poems inspired by nature. All levels welcome.

Gloria Monaghan is a Professor at Wentworth University. She has published seven collections of poetry: Diary of Saint Marion, Lily Poetry Review, (2025), Cormorant on the Strand, Lily Poetry Review (2023), Hydrangea, Kelsay Press,(2020), Torero, Nixes Mate, (2020) False Spring, Adelaide Books, (2019), The Garden, Flutter Press (2015), and Flawed, Finishing Line Press (2011). Her poems have appeared in Mom Egg Review, Quartet and River Heron among others. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, as well as the Massachusetts Book Award, the Griffin Prize, and nominated for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. She is also a film maker.