On March 3, 2020, I launched the Emma Andrews Poetry Workshop Group which met in person at the Emma Andrews Library in Newburyport, MA. On March 13, the library closed and remained closed throughout the pandemic. The group discovered Zoom in September of 2020, and we have been meeting monthly, via Zoom, on the first Friday of the month ever since. We grew in size, adding members who live a long drive away from where we originally met.

The structure of the workshop is this: I prepare (often with input from the group) a topic for poetry prompts for the upcoming workshop and share poems, via email, around the topic about two weeks before the workshop. All participants are encouraged submit a poem and to follow their muse in writing the poem. The first hour is dedicated to reviewing craft elements of the selected poems and the second hour for the group to discuss members’ submitted poems.

Our upcoming workshop is on Friday, October 6, 2023, and runs from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Our topic is ghazals and pantoums, two challenging and fascinating poetry forms that frequently appear in the poetry literature today. You might consider this model for your poetry workshop on occasion.