Finding the Poem in Family Stories

Family stories can help create the path into a greater understanding of our individual and collective history. Often, they document a relationship to place, and create windows into the past for both current and future generations. In this generative workshop, poet and teacher Pauletta Hansel will help participants to choose stories to mine for their personal and cultural significance, and to craft them in such a way that they are not (or not only) a chronological telling, but have emotional and symbolic resonance for both writer and reader. We will consider several examples of poems that use story to do this work, and each participant will have the opportunity to create and share a first draft of their own.

About Pauletta Hansel

Pauletta Hansel’s ten poetry collections include Will There Also Be Singing? (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2024); Heartbreak Tree (Madville Publications, 2022), which won the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2023 North American Book Award; and Palindrome (Dos Madres Press, 2017) winner of Berea College’s Weatherford Award in Poetry.  Her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first poet laureate, and the 2022 Writer in Residence for the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library.