Genre: Poetry

Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency

The Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, administered by PEN Northwest, offers a seven-month residency from April through October to a poet or prose writer, or pair of writers, at Dutch Henry Homestead in the Rogue River Canyon of southwest Oregon. Residents are provided with private lodging, including two small bedrooms, a sleeping loft, a living room with a kitchen, a bathroom, and a roof-deck, on 92 acres of forest and meadow. One hour of general homestead maintenance is required each day. Residents will also receive a stipend of at least $3,500.

Type: 
RESIDENCY
Ignore Event Date Field?: 
no
Event Date: 
April 1, 2025
Rolling Admissions: 
no
Application Deadline: 
March 15, 2024
Financial Aid?: 
no
Financial Aid Application Deadline: 
June 8, 2025
Free Admission: 
no
Contact Information: 

Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, PEN Northwest, c/o John Daniel, 23030 W. Sheffler Road, Elmira, OR 97437.

Contact City: 
Elmira
Contact State: 
OR
Contact Zip / Postal Code: 
97437
Country: 
US

5 Over 50: 2023 Virtual Reading

Caption: 

In this virtual reading and conversation, Poets & Writers editor in chief Kevin Larimer introduces the 2023 cohort of “5 Over 50” debut authors, Alma García, author of All That Rises (University of Arizona Press, 2023); Bernardine “Dine” Watson, author of Transplant (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2023); Tommy Archuleta, author of Susto (Center for Literary Publishing, 2023); Chin-Sun Lee, author of Upcountry (Unnamed Press, 2023); and Donna Spruijt-Metz, author of General Release From the Beginning of the World (Parlor Press, 2023).

Love’s Thorns

12.12.23

Love poems have a long and storied literary history. “The Love Song for Shu-Sin,” composed in ancient Mesopotamia for use in fertility rituals, is considered by some to be the oldest love poem found in text form. “Song of Songs” from the Old Testament of the Bible celebrates the romantic and sexual love between two people. In more recent times, poets have been testing the limits of the love poem. Nate Marshall’s “palindrome” imagines an estranged lover’s life rewound like a film as the subject becomes “unpregnant” and the speaker “unlearn[s]” her name. In Sharon Olds’s “The Flurry,” two parents discuss how to tell their children they’re getting a divorce. Think of a relationship in your life that resists easy categorization and write a love poem that attempts to capture this complexity. Whether the subject is the distant love of a parental figure or the one who got away, resist the easy associations that come with the emotion and dive into love’s thorny contradictions.

Eponymous Poem

12.5.23

The thirteen lines of the late Molly Brodak’s self-titled poem read: “I am a good man. / The amount of fear / I am ok with / is insane. / I love many people / who don’t love me. / I don’t actually know / if that is true. / This is love. / It is a mass of ice / melting, I can’t hold / it and I have nowhere / to put it down.” Through a series of declarative, zigzagging statements, the short poem manages to touch upon a handful of intense emotions—doubt, fear, uncertainty, desperation, and helplessness—all tied together by the eponymous title. This week write a short self-titled poem. How can you bring your own deeply personal responses to questions about your life and relationships under poetic scrutiny in a way that represents your individuality?

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