Teaching Artist: Mary Newell, PhD
Dates: Monday, April 6-Sunday, May 3
Format: Hybrid (Meets 4 Mondays live via Zoom at a time TBD with cohort & Online between live sessions (Zoom sessions will be recorded for those who are uable to attend live)
Mary Newell is the author of the poetry book ENTWINE (BlazeVox Press 2025) as well as the chapbooks TILT/ HOVER/ VEER and Re-SURGE, poems in numerous journals including Alligatorzine, About Place, Talisman, Spoon River Review, Green Theory and Praxis, and The Hopper and in anthologies including Civilization in Crisis and Poetry for the New Millennium, as well as essays including “When Poetry Rivers” (Interim journal 38.3). She is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics and Poetics for the More-than-Human-World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary. Newell teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Connecticut, Stamford and occasional workshops, most recently at Manhattanville University. She was interviewed by Cole Swensen for the Brooklyn Rail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIIp-pbuSjM. Newell is also a certified practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education and has a broad background in holistic and mind-body practices. She lives in Beacon, New York in the Hudson Highlands.
In this workshop, we will explore how different vowels can shape the tones of our writing and incite corresponding responses in readers. Vowels resonate at different levels in the body; they relate to the chakras as well as to anatomical resonators and can tap all layers of our physical and spiritual being. Vowels can be more interior or more exterior, can sound higher or lower in the mouth, and their frequencies have varying effects, singly and in combinations. We can practice attuning to vowel sounds and explore selecting words whose vowel patterns elicit particular chakra vibrations. We will read a few poems that show sensitivity to vowel sounds and draft our own. Choosing words according to their resonances can broaden your expressive range and deepen your writing practice. As a support, we will engage in exercises to enable our bodies to become more available as carriers of sound and significance. We’ll begin with the points of contact between body and page or computer - the hands and arms – and expand to include the whole of our embodied selves. Practicing attentive relaxation and following the breath throughout the body will encourage full expression. By allowing our whole body to become a carrier of the messages in our hearts, minds, and spirits, we can write more freely and more evocatively. This approach can serve writers of all genres.