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October 2016 Writer’s Workshop Theme: Suggestion

Suggestion Suggests

• Talk about the word suggestion and what it suggests

• Make a list of ways that you might make a suggestion, and of what they may be about, perhaps include some real, or imagined suggestions you have made

• Reveal your lists of how and what your suggestions are or were

Gates to Suggestion

• Read pages 92 and 93 from Jane Hirshfield’s book Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

• Talk about the balance between the precise and the suggestive, the specific and the unsaid

• Talk about how we might be suggestive in our work

• Focus on the poem

• Write your own similar poem

• Reveal your work

Question the Suggestion

• Read the beginning of Raymond Carver’s short story What we talk about when we talk about love.

• Talk about using questions as an aide to suggestion.

• Write a piece of work using questions, use one of your own suggestions as the basis

• Reveal your work

Suggestion Within and Without

• Read Love after Love by Derek Walcott

• Talk about the poem, talk about the previous readers notes

• Ask someone to read the ‘clean’ version

• What is suggested, what is specific

• Write your own similar poem

• reveal your work

Said to Suggest

• Read the beginning of chapter 15 from Cees Nooteboom’s Lost Paradise

• What is being suggested

• What is being said, what is not being said

• Write your own said and not said piece

• Reveal your work

Gathered Readings

• Introduce and read some of your previously prepared work

• Receive feedback quietly