Extraordinary Writing from Ordinary Life

Extraordinary experience isn’t required to write extraordinary literary work. In this class we’ll talk about ways poets and writers make the familiar strange. We’ll try out a range of exercises that work toward defamiliarizing mundane objects, settings, and routines to make precise and powerful work from the stuff of everyday life and leave with a reading and prompt list for further exploration and study. This is a cross-genre workshop, but might be most appealing to students interested in poetry, lyric nonfiction, experimental fiction, or hybrid and cross-genre work.

About Jessica Johnson

Jessica E. Johnson writes poetry and nonfiction. She’s the author of the book-length poem Metabolics and the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other, and is a contributor to the anthology Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Annulet Poetics, The Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch. She teaches at Portland Community College and co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series at Tin House.