PSNY Virtual Workshop: This Poem is a Compost Heap

An all-levels generative virtual workshop with poet Jaclyn Desforges!

What if poems were compost heaps? What if we stopped trying to keep our work clean and pristine, and instead got our hands dirty – playing in the muck, the mud, the rot of transformation? Drawing on fairy tale logic, mycelial thinking, and the poetics of decay, we'll investigate how poems can become sites of regeneration – dark, fertile places in which language decomposes and sprouts into new and unexpected forms. We’ll read works by poets who embrace the weird, the grotesque and the transformative -- Rita Dove, CAConrad, and Zachary Schomburg, among others – before turning our attention to our own compost heaps. There, we’ll play with erasure, mycelial iterations, and experiment with regenerative forms.

This workshop is all about mess-as-method, about decomposition and linguistic fermentation. Bring your drafts that aren't working. Bring your weirdest, wildest instincts. All levels welcome—if you're ready to make some mucky magic, you belong here.

About the Instructor: Jaclyn Desforges is the queer and neurodivergent author of a short story collection called Weird Babies (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2026), a poetry collection called Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press, 2021), and a picture book called Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020). She’s currently writing her first novel, Eyelash Person, with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

A Bread Loaf alumna and RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award Winner, Jaclyn’s writing has appeared in CRAFT Literary, The Fiddlehead, Room, and other magazines across North America. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best American Short Fiction & Fantasy, as well as Best American Short Stories, and she was a finalist for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. Jaclyn’s poetry collection travelled to the moon in 2025 as part of the New York Times-featured Lunar Codex Project. She teaches creative writing at Wilfrid Laurier University and lives with her partner and daughter in Hamilton, Ontario.

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

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