Being Brave Poetry Workshop with Elizabeth Herron
Join us for this free workshop at OCA with Elizabeth Herron! Admission is free but we ask that you register so that we may prepare appropriately. Foster bravery as you're inspired to write poetry that speaks from your soul. Learn tips and tricks from Sonoma County's Poet Laureate and meet community members who share your fondness for poetry.
The workshop will be held from 1-3:30 PM at OCA on Sunday, November 19th.
What does living bravely look like in a time of radical climate change, war, inflation – flood and famine, and violence that invades our churches, our schools, our local grocery and even our neighbor’s house? In fact it takes courage just to read the news. It takes courage to accept the contradictions in our lives – that I am safe while others are living through war, that I have food while others are starving. It takes courage to admit a mistake or to apologize and sometimes just to tell the truth. It takes courage to look into our own hearts and confront our fears, failures, losses, and loneliness.
As Poet Laureate and with the support of Poets & Writers, Elizabeth's workshops foster the writing of being brave poems where people who may never have written a poem before can find words for what being brave means in their lives. The workshop includes conversation about what our poems tell us of what it means to live courageously.
The world of poetry has been enlivened by voices unheard in the past; it has been enlivened by spoken word, by rap and by hip-hop. The infusion of language from the street up has brought story back into poetry and the poet back into the poem. So it is a very good time to support a project designed to evoke poems from all voices and all corners of Sonoma County.
Wherever we notice our fear or hesitancy, there's an opportunity to be brave. Courage should be celebrated for its most humble moments, which usually remain invisible, to its grand inspirations in someone like Volodomyr Zalensky.
Whether it’s a private moment from one’s own life or an homage to an inspirational other – if we share such poems and make time for conversation about them, we will learn things about ourselves and each other that cannot help but deepen our understanding and respect and bring us all closer. By directing us to the question of how to live bravely in this time and place, I hope the Being Brave Poetry Project will evoke the compassion and the imagination we need to navigate the future as individuals and in community.
Despite everything, we need the courage to celebrate what goes on living and what goes on blooming and what gives us joy.
Aldo Leopold, father of the modern environmental writing, famously observed we take care of what we feel affection for, and Toni Morrison says that “Beauty makes the unbearable bearable.” My own poetry is always an effort to find the beauty that compels affection, even when the subject is otherwise unbearable. We want our hearts awakened, and poetry is about the heart. In the Being Brave Poetry Project, we will hear the heart speak.
It takes courage to meet our own suffering, and courage is centered in the heart. To look at what is held there begins a process of change; and to share what is held there makes us vulnerable. When we are brave enough not only to look but to creatively share what we find, it becomes a form of spiritual practice, a practice that nurtures compassion and community.
This workshop includes an introduction by Elizabeth Herron and:
(1) guided writing with short prompts
(2) writing time,
(3) a time for sharing
(4) conversation facilitated by Elizabeth centered on what we’ve learned by listening to our hearts and to each other. [articulating our values, what it means to live courageously]
About Elizabeth: Author of four previous books of poetry: Insistent Grace (from Fernwood Press) and most recently In the Cities of Sleep (also from Fernwood); The Poet’s House; Desire Being Full of Distances; and five chapbooks, Elizabeth C. Herron also writes articles about the importance of natural systems in the well-being of all life. Her work has appeared in Reflections, North American Review, West Marin Review, Free State Review, Comstock Review and Parabola, and is included in Face to Face: Women Writing on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening; Fire and Rain, Ecopoetry of California; and What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be. The Mesa Refuge for Writers, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Foundation for Deep Ecology have supported her work. She is a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers and lives with her husband in Northern California where she is the Poet Laureate of Sonoma County (2022 to 2024).