Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Meaning Behind Words, Part 3
Taking Poetry Workshop to Hone Writing Craft
Turning to a career in poetry was a surprise to two-time Poetry Workshop student Edith Friedman. Finding comfort and pleasure in reading the work of established writers in our Certificate Program in Creative Writing elective course, was not. Edith grew up in Berkeley, graduated from UC Berkeley and majored in English literature.
“After graduation, I worked for various nonprofits serving people with disabilities, low-income tenants, farmworkers, people in underserved neighborhoods and health workers,” Edith says. “Most of my professional writing has been in the form of project newsletters, grant proposals and reports.
“The unexpected pleasures and challenges of writing poetry found me when I was 54 years old and I took the course Poetry Workshop. Learning to translate my thoughts, emotions and observations into poems was so compelling that three years later I decided to go back to school for an M.F.A. in poetry writing.”
Before she went on to earn her M.F.A. in 2022 from Saint Mary’s College of California, Edith describes that first experience in Caroline Goodwin’s Poetry Workshop as a lucky break—or possibly fate.
“I loved the class, and found myself continuing to write poems over the next two years, including while caring for my father in his last months of life. I learned that beyond the satisfaction of making new language objects out of scraps, feelings, images and ideas, poetry could help me survive emotional milestones in my life. I wanted to learn more about how poetry works and how to make mine better, and that’s why I signed up for Caroline’s workshop again.
“I learned a great deal about the creative possibilities of poetry through considering elements of published poems in many forms and voices, from George Herbert to Brenda Hillman, and especially through engaging with classmates’ poems based on the writing prompts we all tried every week. Caroline taught us to critique each other’s work from a place of care and curiosity.
“Along with Caroline’s skilled and compassionate modeling, the intimate setting helped us build trust in each other to share sometimes very personal material. Her feedback in class and in written comments, from her perspective as an experienced poet and writing teacher, helped me see the strengths and weaknesses in my draft poems. Many of the other students, like me, had worked at jobs completely unrelated to creative writing before coming to the class; they offered perspectives informed by their own life experiences, so I learned how the work landed with different readers.”
One of those learned skills was taking into account reader feedback during the poem revision process.
“I find revision to be one of the most difficult aspects of making a poem, and the gift of feedback helped me hone in on what parts of the poem were working and what I needed to change,” Edith says.
“Meeting people who wanted to discuss poetry beyond the classroom and exchange work after the class ended gave me an early taste of a new-to-me community I wanted to join. Caroline encouraged us to revise and submit our work and offered strategies to help prioritize among the thousands of literary magazines, contests and websites. The experience of submitting an early poem to a literary magazine where it was accepted definitely motivated me to keep writing!”
Edith’s recently published work, Reconstruction, is the winner of the 2024 Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook Award. She began tackling this poetry collection’s main themes during her time in the workshop.
“The collection explores bodily autonomy and surgical choices in the context of family breast cancer history,” she explains. “Writing about those experiences opened up questions of beauty, feminism, disability, cultural practices, heredity, family relationships and community; poetry offered me a way to grapple with those questions that I had been missing.”
Edith, like Katie Flynn and Jorrell Watkins, sees her writing career and goals continuing to evolve, just as life evolves around them.
Whether your goal is publication or landing a coveted spot in an M.F.A. writing program, Certificate Program in Creative Writing can meet your needs.
In the first two parts in this three-part series, we talk with Certificate Program in Creative Writing instructors Katie Flynn and Jorrell Watkins on the relationship between reading and writing skills.
