Breaking the Bowl

Announcing Breaking the Bowl 2024

An organic forms class and workshop led by David Koehn with Rusty Morrison

“Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.”
 Robert Hayden

Are you interested in a course that will give you tools to enact for yourself new ways to enliven your writing? In tools that will continue to evolve with you, as you continue to follow your own trajectory?

In this course you’ll discover compelling strategies for inspired revision, augmented by ideas for how to break formal traditions in new ways that reflect and extend your creative repertoire.

Each week, we will feature a short talk by a guest poet, followed by a Q&A; each poet will share with candor the creative directions, the risks, the challenges, they each face in their own work.

Guests in past workshops led by David Koehn have included poets such as Ange Mlinko, Jericho Brown, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Sally Wen Mao, Joseph Rios, Kazim Ali, Victoria Chang, Forest Gander, Robert Hass, Sherwin Bitsui, Gillian Conoley, Cody Walker, Matthew Zapruder, Norma Cole, Maxine Chernoff, Brian Teare, Tara Betts, William Logan, Donald Revell, Tyrone Williams, Jim Daniels, Craig Santos Perez, Myung Mi Kim, Robert Pinsky, Cole Swensen, Ewa Chrusciel, Daniel Poppick, Annie Finch, Geoffrey G.O’brien, Elena Karina Byrne, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Arthur Sze, & others.

2024 Breaking the Bowl featured guests:

week one, 9/22 Laura Wetherington

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week two, 9/29 Bret Shepard

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week three, 10/6 Maria Nazos

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week four, 10/13 Jose-Luis Moctezuma

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Writers taking this online course will benefit from having a poem of theirs (of their choice) discussed (workshopped) each week by David Koehn and Rusty Morrison.

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Space is limited. Last day to apply: Saturday, September 21st, 2024

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The meeting times are every Sunday.
Everyone is together for the first hour from 10am to 11am, Pacific.
Section one from11am to12pm Pacific Time
(one hour for lunch)
Section two from1pm to 2pm Pacific Time
for 4 weeks,
from September 22 to October 13, 2024

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Please hold your time open, from 10am to 2pm, PST.
(on some Sundays, we may go beyond 2pm PST. this may be because guest stays longer than the commitment, which is a delight.)

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Everyone will join together at 10am, to participate together in
–the Breaking the Bowl discussion hosted by David,
–& in being present for the featured guest,
–& in asking the guest questions.

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Then group one will stay together & group two will leave and return at about noon, this will depend upon how long the guest wants to stay with us.
We do not tell a guest to stop.

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We won’t assign groups until all are signed up, this allows us to create balance…

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Writers taking this online course will benefit from having a poem of theirs discussed each week by David Koehn.

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Tuition: Sliding Scale: $650-$1000

(90% of which is tax-deductible,
 donated to Omnidawn Publishing, a fiscally sponsored 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization).

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How to Apply:

How to Apply:

Please send us a 5-page sample of finished poems, through Submittable at this link:

https://omnidawn.submittable.com/submit

These poems will give us an evaluative appreciation of your work & a sense of your approach to writing. These are not poems that you would then need to bring to the weekly workshop (unless that is what you’d want to do; it’s always up to you to decide what poem to bring to workshop). 

If you have difficulties with any of the above, &/or if you have other questions, then use this email template–Click on this e-address to access  the best template for asking me any questions: rusty@omnidawn.com

If you have difficulties with any of the above, &/or if you have other questions, ask me at (template at the link): rusty@omnidawn.com

thank you!

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Space is limited; enrollment decisions will be made on a “first come, first served” basis. Last day to apply: FRIDAY September 8, 2023, unless the class fills before this deadline.

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Some partial scholarships available: 
write to Rusty Morrison using this email template here: rusty@omnidawn.com for partial scholarship information.

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Two good things:

1. All sessions are recorded, so all who are participants can listen to the sessions again and again. So, this means that if you need to miss a week, then you still will be able to hear this recording of the featured guest and the workshop.

2. If something happens to you during the course (for instance, an unexpected serious illness) and you’re unable to continue participating in the course, then you can take the course again next year for no charge.

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David Koehn’s first chapbook Coil (University of Alaska, 1998), won the Midnight Sun Chapbook Contest. His first full-length manuscript, Twine (Bauhan Publishing, 2013), won the May Sarton Poetry Prize.

David coedited Compendium, (Omnidawn Publishing, 2017), a text offering Donald Justice’s original syllabus on prosody. David’s second full-length book of poetry, Scatterplot, was published by Omnidawn in 2020. David holds an MFA from the University of Florida, a Bachelors in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon, an M.Ed (TFA) from the University of Alaska. David’s writing appears in a range of magazines including Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle, Hotel Amerika, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Volt, Carolina Quarterly, Diagram, McSweeney’s, The Greensboro Review, North American Review, and many others. For more info see: davidkoehn.com