Settle into an immersive poetry writing experience with a small group, and make creative writing a part of your weekly routine. No previous experience with poetry writing is necessary to participate.
Metaphor and Renewal
8-week poetry writing series
“Metaphors are essential to our understanding of our world, and can be used as a mechanism for creating new meaning in our lives… ”
–– George Lakoff and Mark Johnson ‘Metaphors We Live By’
Metaphors are everywhere. We may speak about time getting lost, stolen, saved (‘time is a limited resource’). In our lives, we may tell our friends that we’re going through a rocky patch, feeling a little lost, unsure of the right path (‘life is a journey’). There are metaphors that are shared with an entire culture, and there are metaphors that are deeply personal. Even if we’re not aware of what these metaphors are, they influence our experience in subtle and profound ways.
In this workshop, you’ll explore the metaphors that have shaped your experience, and then you’ll harness your creativity to write new, imaginative metaphors that will breathe new life into the way you see the world. These new metaphors are the seed from which the poetry you write every week will be born.
Register For Class
NEXT SERIES: Mondays, February 24th – April 7th, 2025
Time: 5:30-7:45pm PT
(convert to time zone)
Cost: $350 CAD
Where: Online, over Zoom
Number of participants: 6
Registering before January 24th 2025? I’d like to gift you an…
EARLYBIRD DISCOUNT: use the code EARLYBIRD2025 for $25 off at the checkout
Workshop Description
Every week, we’ll begin with a spirited conversation about the various ways we each see the world (see themes for each week below) and then we’ll each wander for metaphors that capture our experience. This conversation will be guided.
“What exactly is a metaphor? This sounds too literary and challenging. I don’t have the ability to do this.” HOLD ON!! During each class, we’ll unravel the world of metaphor together bit by bit, and you’ll learn embodied tools for accessing the metaphors that speak to your experience as it is now and as you would like to be. Even if this the very first writing class you’ve ever taken, you’ll be surprised by what emerges.
In the second half of class, you’ll participate in a three part writing ritual that includes breath, guided freewriting, and 15 minutes of silence to write a poem that includes one of your new metaphors. We’ll end with a poetry roundtable, where you can share what you’ve written with the group, and hear the poetry of others. Sharing is not mandatory.
All classes are facilitated by Christine Bissonnette.
Read testimonials from past workshops, here.
WEEKLY SCHEDULE
Week 1: Voice
“[There was] me, alone on stage holding my own throat like a bottle full of lightening, and a whole room gathered around to witness.” – Jillian Christmas (Poetry is Dead Magazine, Issue 19)
How has your voice changed throughout your life? In this first session, you’ll find metaphors for your voice as it was in the past, how it is in the present, and for how you’d like it to feel in the future. Through this exploration, you’ll notice how a sequence of metaphors can tell a story.
Week 2: Body and Mind
“Taming the Bull: The whip and rope are necessary, else he might stray down some dusty road. Being well trained, he becomes naturally gentle. Then, unfettered, he obeys his master.” – Kakuan
Western culture encourages us to think of our bodies as machines, our minds as computers. How have these metaphors shaped your experience? Could a new metaphor invite a different way of being in the world?
Week 3: Life
“Some wounds never vanish. / Yet little by little / I learned to love my life.” – Mary Oliver, from Hum, Hum (poem)
Life is a journey. It may seem like a cliche but when you take a step back, the belief system that accompanies this metaphor is everywhere. What would a different metaphor for life reveal that the ‘life is a journey’ metaphor so craftily hides?
Week 4: Uncertainty and Fear
“Fear and joy come from our centre.” – Claude Kipnis, from ‘The Mime Book’
When fear arrives, what happens next? When uncertainty looms in the distance, how do you move forward? Consider your relationship to the sensations, thoughts, and imagery which accompany both fear and uncertainty, and then discover how the metaphors we use, teach us how to cope with our experience.
Week 5: Time
“Each movement is an ocean / whose currents mingle. / Day is a moment held with countless others / in a world obsessed with time”
– Robin Skelton, from On Waking (poem)
Do you treat time as a limited resource? As something lost, stolen, earned, wasted? Or maybe time feels more like a moving object that can be missed, leaving you behind? In this session, we’ll acknowledge the strong cultural metaphors for time that exist around us, and then you’ll write some new, life-giving metaphors for time of your own.
Week 6: Dreams and Goals
“Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hot within her.”
– Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One’s Own
Are your dreams a beacon at the end of windy path? A lighthouse shining in the distance? In this session, you’ll identify and reimagine your relationship to those destinations that feel beyond your grasp or ability.
Week 7: Giving and Receiving
“Your deepest presence is in every small contracting / and expanding, / the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated / as birdwings.”
– Jalal Al-Din Rumi, from Birdwings (poem)
The breath provides a beautiful template for exploring our relationship to giving (exhale) and receiving (inhale). In this session, we’ll begin by finding metaphors for our breath, and then we’ll notice how this experience of breath stretches out into the world, influencing how we both give and receive in our lives.
Week 8: Power
“It is better to name ourselves names that challenge us to grow as free creatures. That is thriving. That is what is meant for us.”
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves
Where does your source of power come from? How is your vitality and strength supported by the new metaphors you’ve found in this series? In this final session, we’ll bring it all together.
Registering before January 24th 2025? I’d like to gift you an…
EARLYBIRD DISCOUNT: use the code EARLYBIRD2025 for $25 off at the checkout