Susan brings tools and techniques to workshops designed to help you feel excited about writing (and teaching) poetry. Susan has found that in a safe, free setting, surrounded with words, most everyone can write poems that bring delight and discovery.

Susan starts us off playing with language. First, we create “wordpools” that help us see that we’re all immersed in an ocean of words we largely ignore. We begin with images, practice close observation, develop metaphor, and gradually move into “dreamsense,” where we can explore who we are, where we come from and where we’re going.

Music, paintings and “word tickets” are all used to help us enter the realm where we begin to write poems that express more than words can say, an act Allen Ginsberg called “ordinary magic.”

Susan offers workshops ranging from two hours to two days for people of all ages–at conferences, in schools, businesses and homes. In longer workshops we may gather objects, write invocations and meet with our shadows.