Making Sense Making Words Matter

Join InsideOut Literary Arts Senior Writer, Peter Markus, for a series of writing workshops where participants will read and discuss and write their own poems as a way of making sense of the world.

In Markus's own words: "Remember this, believe in this when I tell you: you don't have to be a poet, you don't have to say or see yourself as a poet, to benefit from spending time reading and writing poetry. Look, too, and closely, at the words of French novelist Collette, who said: "Look hard at what pleases you and harder at what doesn't." This workshop will offer its poets a safe and supportive place to talk and write and listen, to each other and to ourselves. I hope you'll join me. I look forward to spending time with you and your words."

Peter Markus is the senior writer with InsideOut Literary Arts, a non-profit organization that's been sending professional writers into metro Detroit schools since 1995. Markus is the author of six books of fiction, among them Bob, or Man on Boat, as well as We Make Mud and The Fish and the Not Fish, which was selected as a Notable Michigan Book in 2015 and was reviewed here in the Detroit Free Press: https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/arts/2015/01/11/peter-markus-notable-books/21503015/ He is also the author of a book of non-fiction, Inside My Pencil, a narrative account of the kind of teaching that Markus does with InsideOut. Markus's most recent book is the collection of poems, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, which explores the death of his father and how this experience shaped Markus to see the world through sharper eyes. Participants of this workshop will receive a copy of this book and will use it to help them find and write their own poems in conversation with the grief and the love both lost and found that Markus himself has been working through.