PSNY Virtual Workshop: Mourning the Unmentionable

An all-levels generative virtual workshop with poet Madeline Phillips!

We hold funerals for the dead, but where are the flowers, casseroles, and condolences when you lose your cat in the breakup? Loss is not limited to death: friendships end, divorces proceed, therapists ghost, dreams disappear — the list goes on. Everyone you know is grieving something, but most won’t mention it. How can we move on from what we cannot name? In this workshop, we’ll generate writing as a mourning ritual. We’ll learn new names for loss, and invent ones of our own. Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Lisa Olstein, Nikki Giovanni, and Heather Christie will inspire us to create space to grieve what we didn’t know we could.

About the Instructor: Madeline Phillips (she/her) is an NYC-based poet and performer who overdresses for every occasion. She is currently working on two manuscripts: a collection of postcard poems and a crown of queer sonnets. Her work has been published in Battery Journal, the Marymount Review, Poetry Nook, and Bowery Gothic. Madeline is also active in the NYC zine community, with work featured in Poetry is a Team Sport, Dead End Zine, Bad Words Press, and Poetry is Gay. You can read more of her work, as well as an interview with Brooklyn Poets, where she was a two-time Yawp Poem of the Month winner and runner-up for Yawp Poem of the Year, at https://linktr.ee/reign_of_madeline. If you're a poet who likes karaoke, come to her open mic, Sing2Me Read2Me Baby, and introduce your poem with a song!

**This workshop will take place on Zoom.**