A Free Workshop "Write it Weird" and Reading from Sarah Kain Gutowski and Cynthia Marie Hoffman

The Workshop: Write It Weird: Our Ordinary Experiences Made Fantastic and Meaningful Through Metaphor and Imagery

Sometimes engaging with the strange, unusual, and unexpected can result in poignant, invaluable insight about our everyday lives. Poets Sarah Kain Gutowski (author of THE FAMILIAR, Texas Review Press), and Cynthia Marie Hoffman (author of EXPLODING HEAD, Persea Books), will lead the audience through a generative writing exercise designed to encourage associative thinking through metaphor and image-building. Participants will then engage in a hands-on revision exercise that breaks away from narrative and gives writers a new method for generating surprising discoveries in their own writing.

This 1 hour event is multi-genre and geared for writers with varying levels of experience, and will include time for workshop participants to share what they’ve created.

Their books: The Familiar by Sarah Kain Gutowski and Exploding Head by Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of The Familiar, a fabulist narrative-in-poems about female existential crisis, and Fabulous Beast: Poems. Her poetry has appeared in various print and online journals, including The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry, and It's All Too Much, a limited-edition audio project. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and New York Journal of Books.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four collections of poetry: Exploding Head, Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, all from Persea Books. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Essays in TIME, The Sun, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Poems in Electric Literature, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Cynthia lives in Madison, WI. www.cynthiamariehoffman.com