“What I meant to say…”: A Creative Writing Workshop

This is a live, online seminar held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English.

Instructor: Irena Klepfisz

Course Description:
Sometimes, if we are lucky, we are actually able to get down on paper exactly what we had in mind before we started writing. But more often, there is a gap, even a chasm, between what we find on the page and what we had envisioned we would write. This workshop will help participants bridge that chasm.

Each workshop session will be divided into two parts: (a) analysis and discussion of poetry and prose/essays (all of which will be provided digitally to students) by published writers of diverse backgrounds; (b) analysis and discussion of participants' original work and sample exercises.

The workshop's primary aim is to make writers more sensitive to editing and refining strategies and to allow them to experiment in applying them through exercises in voice, language, structure, and possibly visual layout. Being able to identify options when polishing a draft or to create original ones suited to a specific piece of writing is essential when working to bring a draft closer to its original idea/image. In other words, we will concentrate on process in developing a work. This will include recognizing when something is finished, even though it may not be perfect.

Though much of the focus will be on poetry, participants are encouraged to breach genre borders. The workshop is open to all, including those who are just beginning to write and others who have many years of experience in writing and reading.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide course materials digitally to students throughout the class.

Irena Klepfisz is a poet, Yiddish translator, teacher and feminist/gay activist who has focused much of her research on Yiddish women writers and intellectuals.  She recently retired from 22 years of teaching Jewish Women's Studies at Barnard College. She was a recipient of an NEA fellowship and NYFA grant in poetry and a finalist for the poetry Lambda Award. In 2016 she was honored to receive the Dreaming in Yiddish Prize from the Adrienne Cooper Fund. The author of A Few Words in the Mother Tongue (poetry) and Dreams of an Insomniac (essays), she is preparing the manuscript for a bilingual collection of her poetry and prose to be published next year by the Polish publishing house słowo/obraz terytoria (word/image territories).

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