First Meeting of "The Parent-Child Writing Summit"

Saturday, September 6, 2014 - 4:00am to Saturday, September 13, 2014 - 4:00am
Poetry Center - Helen S. Schaefer Building 1508 East Helen Street (At Vine Avenue) Tucson, AZ 85721 United States

Online registration for this course opens in early August. To register, please check back then!

Taught by Mason Gates
Two Saturdays, September 6 and 13
11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
Tuition: $5 reservation fee per parent/child pair
Appropriate for children ages 8 to 12

In this workshop, parents and their children will have the unique opportunity to connect and inspire one another by writing poetry together. Research shows that family members play a significant role in inspiring children to read and write. This workshop is not only fun, but will help your children develop as readers and writers.

During two three-hour sessions, participants will read work by both classic and contemporary poets such as Emily Dickinson, Zachary Schomburg, and Walt Whitman, and use these texts as inspiration for their own writing. We’ll cultivate the idea of limitlessness in poetry through discussions of poetic form/device and through the practice of nontraditional approaches to writing. We’ll do free-writing, create haikus through erasure, try our hand at writing in meter, and create exquisite corpse compositions. There will be time in workshop to share our poems with each other. In the final hour of workshop, each family will bind a chapbook of the poems they created together during the Summit to take home.

Mason Gates is a poet and student at the University of Arizona Honors College, completing  degrees in both Geology and Poetry. He was a finalist for the Norman Mailer Creative Nonfiction Award and winner of a UA Poetry Center Prize for Poetry. He also enjoys watercolors and losing spars with time.