Cooper Street Workshop: Writing through the Confetti Time of Caregiving

This workshop will be hybrid: both online and in-person attendance options are available. In-person attendees must comply with university COVID-19 safety measures, including wearing face-coverings and physical distancing.

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Instructors: Nancy Reddy and Emily Perez

Both writing and raising children require time, energy, and attention. The work of caregiving has often produced what writer Melissa Stephenson calls “confetti time”–fractured moments, rather than the long stretches we sometimes think are necessary for deep creative work. Do writing and caregiving have to be competition, or are there ways that the two can inspire and feed one another? In this generative open genre workshop featuring the essays and poems of contributors to the forthcoming anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, participants will be introduced to several strategies that can help sustain a writing practice while also parenting or doing other caregiving work. We’ll read a selection of poems and essays that engage different aspects of the relationship between writing and parenting, and we’ll have to discuss how these challenges surface in our own writing lives. Participants will be offered a prompt and time to write. The workshop will include time for participants to share their drafts, compare experiences, and brainstorm directions for future writing. This workshop is open to mothers and caregivers of all genders; participants need not identify as parents.

About the instructors

Nancy Reddy is the author of Pocket Universe (LSU, 2022); Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series; and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She’s also coeditor, along with Emily Pérez, of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (UGA, 2022). Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, Brevity, The Millions, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University.

Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the 2021 Iowa Prize; House of Sugar, House of Stone; and two poetry chapbooks, Made and Unmade and Backyard Migration Route. She co-edited the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Emerging Critic, she has also received support from Bread Loaf, the Artist Trust, Jack Straw Writers, and the Community of Writers. Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, Poetry, The Guardian, LARB, and RHINO. She teaches English and Gender Studies in Denver, where she lives with her family.