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Intensive workshops

Beyond Baroque’s intensive writing workshops allow writers from all schools and walks of life to learn from world-class authors in single and multi-session workshops.

Sagacious Syllabics: A Poetry Workshop with Lory Bedikian Saturday, August 10, 2024 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM PT In Person at Beyond Baroque As poets, we think we are experiencing writer's block when really it is just that we have too much material that needs control, form and measure. In this workshop we will consider what it means, looks and sounds like to write in syllabics or to compose syllabic verse (s.v.). We'll look at the question of can these poems be viewed as verse at all? We'll look at what the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has to offer — how Robert Bridges, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas are often the examples given for this form, however Moore kicks poetic behind in s.v. Specifically, we will analyze poems from Marilyn Hacker's fantastic collection Names, which is mainly constructed in syllabics (alongside ghazals). We'll discuss how writing in syllabics can assist us greatly when we feel stuck, however we need to be aware of the dangers of using this device and losing musicality of the line, etc. We need to use the form as a guide, but then make sure to adjust the pattern when it's significant, strategic, etc. Beginning with smaller exercises, we'll do our best to patch it together and exit with a working draft written with syllables leading the way! Lory Bedikian collection The Book of Lamenting won the Philip Levine Prize and her forthcoming book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body won the 2023 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, forthcoming September, 2024 from the University of Nebraska Press. Several of Bedikian’s poems received the First Prize Award in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry as part of the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards. Her work is published in Miramar, Tin House, The Los Angeles Review, Northwest Review, BOULEVARD, The Adroit Journal, Literary Matters, Orion, wildness, and was featured on Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast. Her poem “The Mechanic,” is included in the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, KNOPF, 2020. Bedikian’s manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. New work is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Guesthouse and Massachusetts Review’s “Revisiting WOMAN: An Issue, 50 Years Later.” Bedikian earned an MFA from the University of Oregon. She teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles.

Gathering Imagery from the Internal Well: A Workshop with Holaday Mason Saturday, August 17 -24, 2024 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM PT In Person at Beyond Baroque This intimate workshop is designed to help writers at all stages to tap into their internal emotional worlds & receive imagery from less conscious aspect of their minds, hearts & histories. Using time honored practices of mediation, selected readings from some of our most beloved imagistic poets, breathwork, sound & guided mediative journeying, participants will travel into their deep inner worlds & gather material which we will write out & then be invited to share in a safe environment. During the interim week, participants will be able to craft the raw writings they’ve “received” from the guided mediations & present a more finished poem in a safe positive workshop environment. We will aim to begin at least two poems or drafts. These practices are frequently powerful & can stir us. For this reason, we ask each person to commit to both sessions & to enter the work by setting personal & collective intentions to create a space for the courageous creativity of everyone. Holaday Mason is author of five full-length collections of poetry:Towards the Forest, Dissolve, The Red Bowl: A Fable in Poems, The “She” Series: A Venice Correspondence (with Sarah Maclay), and The Weaver’s Body and two chapbooks: Interlude & Light Spilling From its Own Cup. Her sixth collection, As If Scattered, will be published by Giant Claw Press in 2024. Nominated for several Pushcart awards, Mason has been published in Hotel Amerkia, Spillway, Solo, Pool, Poetry International, The Laurel Review, and more. She is also a portrait and fine art photographer focusing on the beauty of aging and humans as a part of nature. She served as co-editor for Beyond Baroque’s anthology Echo 681 and she has also lead writing workshops at Beyond Baroque. Currently she is poetry editor for online art an poetry magazine Furious Pure, and she was poetry editor for Mental Shoes. In private practice as a psychotherapist since 1993, she lives in Venice, California, with the flocks of wild green parrots, a meanass cat named Ms. T.T. ( AKA Ms. Twirly Tail, a big ole’ dog named Chewie, and her husband the musician and educator Adrian Baer (#jellybirdla).