Knoxville, TN— The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “A(n) (Un)holy Alliance: Braiding the Sacred and the Profane,” a workshop led by Donna Vorreyer on December 13th, 2023, from 6:00-7:30 PM. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).
The word profane refers to the secular world, the parts of a life that are not directly related to spiritual or religious practice. However you may define the spiritual in your own life, what might happen in our writing if we blend the sacred and the profane to make a liminal world where these two things coexist?
Looking at poems by Kaveh Akbar, Danez Smith, Li Young Lee, Katie Manning and others, we will discuss how writers use sensory image, ritual description, prayer structure, giving of thanks, reframing traditional stories, and borrowing language to braid their memory or experience of the divine into the everyday. After a discussion of model poems, we will complete a generative exercise that will lead to communal, quiet writing time to consider these things in a new draft. Time for questions and to share work will be provided.
While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Donna Vorreyer via PayPal through paypal.me/vorreyerpoet.
Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She lives in the Chicago suburbs where she hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.
This event is brought to you in part by grants provided by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Tennessee Arts Commission.
