DATE: APRIL 28TH, 2019 from11:00 AM to 2:00 PM
LOCATION: DRAGONFLY THRIFT BOUTIQUE @3141 SW 8TH ST, MIAMI, FL 33135. MAP here
COST: ALWAYS FREE. Donations appreciated. Donate to Reading Queer here. Donate to LEAP here.
THIS WORKSHOP IS BROUGHT TO YOU IN PARTNERSHIP WITH LEAP.
Get out your needles, pens, and papers, because Reading Queer is teaming up with LEAP for our multi disciplinary poetry workshop “Stitch and Bitch” with Fabienne Josaphat and Jan Becker. Join us at the eclectic Dragonfly Thrift Boutique for an afternoon of poetry, crochet, and a good ole’ neighborly social.
Basic crochet techniques will be taught to first timers. Supplies will happily be provided to those that don’t bring their own. Any in progress threading projects (knitting, embroidery, cross stitch, etc.) you may have are also welcome!
DESCRIPTION: Fiber art is at its heart a mantra, an ode, a prayer, a poem made tangible. Rhythmic in nature, meditative and mathematic, it has been shown to boost serotonin levels, concentration, and creativity. This workshop combines an old-fashioned social crafting circle with a creative writing workshop. Through a discussion of the history and benefits of crochet (and knitting), as well as a basic primer in rudimentary crochet stitches for first-timers, participants will be introduced to fiber art as a metaphor for writing and revision, and then led through a prompt-driven poetry exercise to produce their own original poems. All skill levels are welcome. Projects in progress welcome. Knitters welcome as well, but the focus of the fiber arts portion of the instruction will be on basic crochet skills.
Crochet
BY JAN MORDENSKI
Even after darkness closed her eyes
my mother could crochet.
Her hands would walk the rows of wool
turning, bending, to a woolen music.
The dye lots were registered in memory:
appleskin, chocolate, porcelain pan,
the stitches remembered like faded rhymes:
pineapple, sunflower, window pane, shell.
Tied to our lives those past years
by merely a soft colored yarn,
she’d sit for hours, her dark lips
moving as if reciting prayers,
coaching the sighted hands.
FABIENNE JOSAPHAT is the author of Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow, a novel released with Unnamed Press. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been featured in The Master’s Review, Grist Journal, Hinchas de Poesia, Off the Coast Journal and The Caribbean Writer, as well as in Eight Miami Poets. She lives in South Florida and is currently at work on a second novel.
JAN BECKER is from a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania. She didn’t stay there very long. She grew up in a Marine Corps family, on military bases all over the United States. She is currently an MFA candidate at Florida International University, and has taught courses there in composition, technical writing, creative writing and poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Jai-Alai Magazine, Colorado Review, Emerge, Brevity Poetry Review, Sliver of Stone, and the Florida Book Review. She is the 2015-2016 Writer in Residence at the Girls’ Club Collection in Fort Lauderdale, and winner of the 2015 AWP Intro Journals Award in Nonfiction.
LEAP empowers incarcerated women to transcend their past and successfully re-enter society by providing transformational education, entrepreneurial training, and mentorship. They serve as a model, voice and advocate for the the power of rehabilitation over retribution.
