Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown

24Pearlstreet Workshops

Jessica Jacobs “In the beginning:” Exploring Questions of Spirituality & Religion Through Poetry Poetry February 3 to February 28, 2020 Tuition: $500 Class Size: 15 Session: winter Level: 4 week asynchronous workshop

We live in a time of always more, always faster, where what’s new insists on itself as what’s most important. But outside this frenzy are questions that demand slow pondering, queries old as human consciousness: Why are we here? Is there a God? How do we live knowing our lives have a definite deadline? What does it mean to pray? The long history of human engagement with these ideas, the striving after answers, is best recorded in religious texts. There, we find the stories and rituals, commandments and prohibitions, that, whether or not we believe in a faith of our own, have shaped the world in which we live. And, as a model for our own writing, we’ll be delving into the work of writers who’ve grappled with these ideas and texts, poets like Yehuda Amichai, Ada Limón, Kazim Ali, Jericho Brown, Eleanor Wilner, Marie Howe, and many more.

Intended for writers of all levels, each week will be a blend of close readings, spirited exchange, contemplative meditations, and generative exercises. In this workshop, we’ll add our voices to a conversation that stretches across geography and time.

Biography

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year and winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O'Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock-climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and now serves as the Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), and is at work on a collection of poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.