Dreamwork: A Generative Poetry Workshop
In Practicalities, describing the practice of writing, Marguerite Duras writes, “It’s a matter
of deciphering something already there, something you’ve already done in the sleep of your
life…”
What Duras is describing we might also call a dream and the work necessary to bring the
writing about might be akin to what Freud calls “dream work.” In this generative workshop
we’ll discuss these concepts while keeping our eye on the poem in its pre-poem state.
In this eight-week online, informal workshop for writers of all levels we will begin with the discussion of an outside text, after which we will move on to a series of readings and generative writing
exercises which will result in a collection of first drafts from which students will be able to
construct entirely new works.
Email us at hello@thereaderberlin.com to sign up!
CYNTHIA CRUZ’s most recent collection of poems, Hotel Oblivion (Four Ways Books, 2023), won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award.
Her other publications include Steady Diet of Nothing (Four Ways Books, 2023), Back to the Woods (Four Ways Books, 2023), Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books, 2020), Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018), How The End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012), and Ruin (Alice James, 2006). She is also the author of Disquieting: Essays on Silence (Book*hug, 2019) and The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (Repeater Books, 2020).
She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, BOMB, and the Boston Review. She has published essays, interviews, and book and art reviews in the Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Guernica, and the American Poetry Review.
