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Montmartre Workshop will hold workshops from September 13 to September 17 for fiction writers and creative nonfiction writers, October 25 to October 29 for poets, and November 22 to November 26 for translators in the historic atelier of Toulouse-Lautrec in the Montmartre neighborhood in Paris. Programming includes workshops with fresh pastries, discussions, readings, a craft lesson, a visit to the Shakespeare and Co. bookshop, and a group dinner. The faculty for the September 13 to September 17 workshop includes fiction and creative nonfiction writer Colombe Schneck.
Montmartre Workshop, 7 rue Tourlaque, Paris, France 75018.
In a recent New York Times Magazine article, Nitsuh Adebe speaks with a linguist about the ways in which words evolve over time, noting recent shifts in the use of terms like “POV” and “aesthetic,” especially in social media posts. “How people use a language is what the language is, and most everything we do in an effort to steer one another’s usage—teaching grammar, mocking errors, writing columns—is just an exercise of social power,” writes Abebe. Compose a poem that incorporates a word or phrase that has gained a new meaning in contemporary use, possibly through the rapidly changing landscape of language mediated, distorted, or abbreviated in texting and social media. What sorts of ingenuity, misinterpretation, and customization propelled your selection from its original definition to a new one? How might using it in a new poetic context subject it to an additional layer of meaning?
In this virtual interview, Griffin Poetry Prize trustee Ian Williams speaks with poet Kevin Young about how Dante’s Divine Comedy inspired his collection Night Watch (Knopf, 2025), for which he won the 2026 international Griffin Poetry Prize.
The Central Coast Writers’ Conference will be held on September 25 and September 26 at the Cuesta College San Luis Obispo, California, campus. Programming includes master classes, breakout sessions, panels, meet and greets, keynote addresses, and book signings for poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers.
Central Coast Writers’ Conference, P.O. Box 8106, San Luis Obispo, CA 93403. (805) 610-4252. Meagan Friberg, Director.
The Atticus Hotel Artist-in-Residency Program offers residencies of four days, one week, or two weeks from November 15 to April 1 at the Atticus Hotel in downtown McMinnville, Oregon, to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers. Residents are provided a room with a fireplace, complementary espresso, and other hotel amenities including a fitness room and the option to use the drawing room or board room as a work space. One meal credit a day at the hotel’s onsite Mediterranean-inspired restaurant, Cypress, is provided. Travel and other expenses are not included.
Atticus Hotel Artist-in-Residency Program, 375 NE Ford Street, McMinnville, OR 97128. (503) 472-1975. Erin Stephenson, Co-owner.
“It’s good to have a group of friends who make you feel like you can do anything.” —Nicholas Goodly, author of Star Power
The machines are watching you . . . and they’re talking to each other. In an interview for Phaidon, Trevor Paglen, artist and author of How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI (Verso, 2026), speaks about how most images made in the world today are not centered around a human observer, but are made by machines for other machines. “A simple example is a self-driving car that is making tons and tons of images every second to navigate,” he says. “They’re not making those images for humans, they’re making them for themselves.” Spend some time imagining how a machine might “see” a photograph differently from how a human would, and write a poem with a particular image in mind. What might a machine notice or not notice? How might processing an image and communicating about it be different when we dispense with our conventional ideas of human emotional responses? Experiment with the way certain details are described and remembered.
“Work continuously and discipline yourself for this art that you love.” —Gregory Orr, author of We Interrupt This Broadcast
Write a poem that begins with directions you cannot give, whether it’s returning to a childhood home that no longer exists, finding someone you’ve lost, or reaching a place that has only ever appeared to you in dreams. Let the poem move between the literal and the imagined, charting not only streets and landscapes, but also memories, misdirections, and silences. What landmarks have shifted? What details remain sharp? Allow the act of mapping to reveal both presence and absence, and bring the reader in on what it feels like to be in the place you want to bring them.
