In this generative workshop, MFA faculty Jennifer Espinoza and Nynke Passi explore writing about the impossible - from the traumatic to the mysterious, even the mystical. They will read their own poems and use those as leaping off points for creative exploration in generative prompts; you can respond in any genre.

Nynke Salverda Passi (she/her) is the director of this MFA program and co-chair of MIU’s English dept. She was born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Life & Legends, and more. Her poetry has been anthologized in Pandemic Puzzle Pieces and River of Earth & Sky (Blue Light Press), Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (Glass Lyre Press), and Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic (River Paw Press). Together with Rustin Larson and Christine Schrum, she edited the poetry collection Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day.

Jennifer Espinoza (she/her) is back as a full-time faculty in our MFA. She has mentored in our program in poetry, multi-genre, and creative nonfiction and teaches many of our online courses. She also developed a course called “Writing Consciousness: A Queer Study of Emily Dickinson” for the MFA with help from Eileen Espionza. She is a trans woman poet and author of THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019), plus the new I Don’t Want to be Understood from Alice James Books. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California at Riverside. One of her publications is “Everybody at the Same Time is Beginning to Understand There is No Such Thing as a Self” in Gulf Coast.

https://gulfcoastmag.org/stories/everybody-at-the-same-time-is-beginning-to-understand-there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-self,118

Prompt 1: Write a piece that uses contradiction as its thematic backbone; i.e. ” _____ is true; no it isn’t”.

https://splitlipthemag.com/poetry/0123/joshua-jennifer-espinoza

Prompt 3: Write a piece about a fictional encounter with someone you care about who has passed away or who you have otherwise lost touch with. What would you say to one another?

https://poets.org/poem/sunset-and-purple-flowered-tree

Prompt 5: Write a piece about some kind of small or minor encounter or experience that gave you hope when you were feeling hopeless.

Prompt 6:

Option 1: Prayer

Write a prayer to your ancestors. What have they given you and what do you want to thank them for? What help or blessing do you want to ask of them?

Option 2: Chant

Write a chant that embodies a mystical experience. How can you say the unsayable through metaphor and story? Use questions. Use repetition (for example anaphora, starting lines with the same word or same sequence of words). You can make a refrain that keeps returning but in a different form. All these types of devices lull the mind to a more quiet, subtle state.

Prompt 2: Write about a time you were knocked outside of time and space - outside of your ordinary self - through an impactful or traumatic experience. If it helps, write about yourself in third person for distance. What metaphors can you find to describe that alienation and loneliness? Bring in a fairy tale or mythic image if you want. Was there any redemption, and if so, what is a metaphor that describes it?

Prompt 4: Think of a dream you have had in your life that was particularly vivid and that represented a goodbye or a processing of grief. Describe only the dream - the imagery, every tiny nuance of what things looked, felt, tasted, and sounded like. Make each imagery detail come to life without ever mentioning the impact of the loss itself.