When is it okay (is it okay?) to write about family members and tell stories shared around the dinner table or whispered by aunts and cousins over coffee? Do we hold on to certain stories until a certain person has died? Should we keep family secrets hidden forever? Is the “whole truth” necessary? Should we name names?
In this generative workshop for poets and storytellers, we will discuss and practice writing about family stories or even a few secrets that may have been hidden for years, waiting to be told. We will discover ways to write these with an eye to “protecting the innocent”… or not. Examples will be given and handouts will be provided. HINT: It may be useful to have a few old family photos on your desk as you write.
Instructor Carol Willette Bachofner is an award-winning poet, memoirist, photographer, and watercolorist. She served as Poet Laureate of Rockland, Maine from 2012–2016. Carol is the author of seven books of poetry, her first a chapbook, Daughter of the Ardennes Forest, (Main Street Rag, 2007) and her most recent, Test Pattern, a Fantod of Prose Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Carol enjoys experimenting with forms and fractured forms as well as combining genres. She says: Poetry is a living story, always evolving but never losing sight of its parentage, its legacy.
Her poetry has been danced, classically composed as music, and will be featured this spring on a trail sign at a watershed wetland. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, such as Prairie Schooner, The Connecticut Review, The Comstock Review, Cream City Review, DeLuge, The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry, as well as in the following anthologies, Dawnland Voices, An Anthology of Writings from Indigenous New England (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), Enough! (Littoral Books 2020) and Wait (Littoral Books 2021).