Poetry Weekend Intensive May 16-18

WRITING YOUR WAY HOME: A POETRY WEEKEND INTENSIVE
with award-winning poets, Maria Mazziotti Gillan & Kevin Carey
May 16̶ 18, 2025
at an English Manor House in Mendham, New Jersey

The purpose of this retreat is to give poets the space and time to focus on their writing away from the pressures and distractions of everyday life. Participants will draft poems in the workshops and should bring paper or a notebook, pens, and the willingness to take risks. Please also bring previously-written work for one-on-one critiquing sessions and for group readings.

St Marguerite’s Retreat House, located in Mendham, NJ — is situated on 93 acres of wooded land with pathways for exploring the property. This serene, beautiful setting is perfect for contemplating nature and nurturing the creative spirit.

This poetry weekend intensive is open to all writers over the age of 18.
Request by Retreat House: All Participants must have been inoculated and present proof of vaccination. (Please send copy of your vaccination card with  registration form).

Time: Begins 5 p.m. Friday, May 16, 2025 and ends 1:30 p.m. Sunday, May 18, 2025

At this retreat, poets will find:
• support and encouragement;
• stimulating writing exercises/prompts leading to the creation of new work;
• workshop leaders who are actively engaged in the writing life;
• opportunities to read their work aloud to the group;
• a community of writers and networking opportunities.
Fifteen professional development credits granted.

Poetry Weekend Intensive Schedule:
➢ Friday, May 16, 2025: Please arrive by 5 PM and settle into your rooms.
After dinner, we will break into two groups (about 12 to 15 in each), where
we will have the opportunity to write poetry and share the work.
➢ Saturday, May 17, 2025: After breakfast, we will break into two groups for
morning workshops. Lunch will be served, followed by one afternoon
workshop and either free time or a critiquing session with the poet faculty.
Interested participants can sign up in advance (at the retreat house) and may
bring previously written, typed work for feedback.
After dinner, there will be an additional workshop.
* On Friday and Saturday evenings, the two groups will come together and
we will share our work—either something written on the weekend or
previously.
➢ Sunday, May 18, 2025: Breakfast followed by a workshop. A final reading by
participants will serve as the “closing ceremony” to what we hope will be an
inspiring and productive weekend. Lunch will offer another opportunity for
socializing and networking.

We envision this intensive as a journey, allowing us to look at things differently,
listen to our own inner voice, and create in stillness and community. This is an
opportunity to retreat from the noise and busyness of everyday life and invite the
muse to inspire us. In the workshops, we will capture our stories and memories on
paper, and discover how poetry can, so often, save our lives.

Click here to download registration form, information and fees 

The Old Woman Who Lives in My Belly

Maria Gillan's craft book, Writing Poetry To Save Your Life: How To Find The Courage To Tell Your Stories, was recently listed as the #2 book for the Best Poetry Writing Books.

 

One idea that Maria talks about is the "old woman who lives in [her] belly." In a conversation about the book, Maria explains a bit more about that old woman.

When I speak of the “old woman who lives in my belly,”and encourage my students to find that feature inside themselves, I’m referring to the instinctual part of myself that is sometimes suppressed by the intellectual part that may be trying to control what we write.

Tapping into the instinctual part of ourselves allows us to get to the truth of our lives and gives us courage and let’s just go to places we don’t believe we can go or are afraid to go. 

 

I feel that I only realized this and really learned to trust that voice when I was about 40 and my first book was published. I trace this point of view back to graduate school when a professor said to me that it was in a poem about my father that I had found the story I had to tell. That moment was as if a lightbulb went on and I started to believe that there might be a space in the world for poems written by a lower-class, Italian American daughter of immigrants, poems written by a wife, mother, granddaughter, and later grandmother. 

 

Later I realized that I could help others who also had come from poor backgrounds or who felt for whatever reason that theirs was not a voice anyone wanted to hear.  I realized that by sharing my stories I could form a bridge between myself and other people and let them could walk back into their own past and find their stories. 

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Beth Ann Fennelly Virtual Workshop and Reading March 15

Beth Ann Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, all with W. W. Norton. 

She is also the author of 3 books of prose: Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs; Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, a collection of essays; and The Tilted World, a novel co-authored with her husband Tom Franklin. 

Beth Ann’s poetry has been in over fifty anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Poets of the New Century, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. 

She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year.

Link for her free live reading at 2:30 pm ET & the recorded reading later
 youtube.com/live/3Wj2SoWXsks

The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College offers readings and workshops as part of its Distinguished Poets Series. Following their workshop, poets will give a free reading that is open to the public. These readings are recorded and archived for viewing on the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel.

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Poem: In Third Grade I Fell in Love

In Third Grade I Fell in Love

with language. The poems and stories, read aloud to us
in the dusty classrooms of PS 18 in Paterson, New Jersey,  
had a music that lifted me up above the scarred desks,
names and hearts carved into them
by generations of children, bored from the torture
of sitting still for hours.
 
For me, in my shy skin, the spaces in the school
meant for recess or gym were terrifying,
but inside the classroom, I loved
the books we read and the ones the teachers read to us.

At home, we spoke a southern Italian dialect
that brought Italy to 17th street.
But outside, I was in America.
though wary that I wasn't American enough.

In the classroom, I learned that English had a different kind of music,
one I could move to as if I were dancing.
I loved the poems that repeated themselves in my brain.
After I memorized a poem, I could carry it with me,
as though I had slipped it in my pocket
and could slip it out whenever I was alone and afraid.

My parents could not read to us in English,
but those teachers, all the ones I never thought to thank,
opened the door into a world far from my Italian family,
its aroma of tomato sauce bubbling on the stove,
of rosemary and mint growing outside the back door,
bread baking in the oven.

In books, I could find the way to leave the skin I was born in,
to enter the worlds that appeared on the very first page.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Distinguished Poets Meghan O’Rourke and Nicole Cooley March 1 in Paterson

Meghan O’Rourke, award-winning poet, nonfiction writer, and acclaimed editor, is the author of the poetry collections Sun In Days, Once, and Halflife, and the memoirs The Invisible Kingdom and The Long Goodbye. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, among her many other awards. Meghan writes for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and is the editor of The Yale Review. She is a graduate of Yale University, where she also teaches.

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and is the author of seven books of poems, most recently MOTHER WATER ASH (Louisiana State University Press 2024), as well as OF MARRIAGE (Alice James Books 2018),  GIRL AFTER GIRL AFTER GIRL (LSU Press 2017), BREACH (LSU Press 2010), and other collections. She has also published two chapbooks and a novel. She has received The Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America.  She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York, and lives in New Jersey with her family.

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The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College offers readings as part of its Distinguished Poets Series. The college is limiting the number of attendees for in-person events, so registration is required for in-person workshops. ​Coffee, tea, and a light breakfast will be provided for workshop participants. You can check registration availability by emailing Cynthia Pagan at the Poetry Center.

Workshops whether in-person or virtual are offered for a fee of $20. In-person workshops will be held at the Poetry Center in Paterson from 10 AM – 12  PM. Following their workshop, poets will give a reading which is always free and open to the public. These readings are recorded and archived for viewing on the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel.

Directions and parking information for the Poetry Center 

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.