Workshop: Everyday Poetics: Writing Practices, Reflections, and Strategies

With Dallas Hunt

This workshop will focus on poetic practice, both how to cultivate daily writing practices, but also on the everyday elements of being a writer (from bios, to considerations about audience, among other things). The workshop will also focus on how we situate ourselves in our writing–not only how we present ourselves, but how we are read by our various and varying audiences. It’s a workshop on writing, but one that will interrogate why we write and the stakes in doing so.

Participants of this workshop will:

learn how to create and maintain optimal conditions for writing
learn how to generate new poetic material from everyday objects and texts
learn how to navigate the everyday minutiae of being “a writer”
learn how to be accountable to yourself and your audience in your writing practice

$50 (save 10% if you buy more than one)

Tâwaw (“welcome,” in Cree)!

Suitable for:

All writers, whether new to writing or already published.

What to prepare:

You don’t need to prepare anything in advance. Dallas will be providing materials during the workshop, however, if you have a writer’s bio, please bring this along.

Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta. He has had creative works published in Prairie Fire, PRISM international and Arc Poetry. His first children’s book, Awâsis and the World-famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018, and was nominated for several awards. His first poetry collection, Creeland, published in 2022, was nominated for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award. Hunt lives in Vancouver, BC.

Teeth
By Dallas Hunt
Published by Nightwood Editions

This is a book about grief, death and longing. It’s about the gristle that lodges itself deep into one’s gums, between incisors and canines.

Teeth details not only the symptoms of colonization, but also the foundational and constitutive asymmetries that allow for it to proliferate and reproduce itself. Dallas Hunt grapples with the material realities and imaginaries Indigenous communities face, as well as the pockets of livability that they inhabit just to survive. Still this collection seeks joy in the everyday, in the flourishing of Indigenous Peoples in the elsewhere, in worlds to come.

Nestling into the place between love and ruin, Teeth traces the collisions of love undone and being undone by love, where “the hope is to find an ocean nested in shoulders—to reside there when the tidal waves come. and then love names the ruin.”