These are the offerings I keep. Each is conducted in person where possible, by letter or telephone where it isn’t, and never in volume. Write to me if anything here calls.

One

Workshops

Small-circle workshops in poetry and short fiction, generally three to eight writers, meeting weekly or in concentrated weekend sessions. We read each other’s drafts aloud and we listen for what the line wants. I bring in poets I have loved a long time — Whitman, Apollinaire, Milosz, Langston Hughes, Levon Helm as a kind of poet — and we read against them.

Workshops can be hosted at colleges, libraries, bookshops, or in private homes. I have led groups in Marquette and across the Upper Peninsula, and I travel for the right circle.

• Introduction to the poem · for beginning writers
• The book-length sequence · for poets shaping a collection
• Short fiction in the fantastic mode · Kafka, Brautigan, Bulgakov
• Place and the personal · writing from where you are

Two

Manuscript Shaping

One-on-one work on a poetry collection or a book of stories. I read the manuscript twice — once for the voice of it, once for the shape — and then we talk. The conversation is about sequencing, the arc, the placement of the quiet poems against the loud ones, the title page, the table of contents as a music.

I shaped three of my own books this way for Cornerstone Press — Let It Be Told in a Single Breath, And the Heart Will Not Quicken, and the forthcoming All That My Body Can Bear. Earlier, Somewhere We’ll Leave the World took the same long look at itself before it found its order at Wayne State University Press.

Format: a written response of several pages, followed by a long conversation (in person, by phone, or by post) and, where useful, a second pass after revision.

Three

Readings

I read from the Cornerstone trilogy and the forthcoming book in colleges, libraries, festivals, bookstores, and small literary gatherings. A reading runs forty-five minutes to an hour with time afterward to talk. I will read whatever the room wants — the hotel poems with John Lennon and Federico Fellini, the Lake Superior poems with Whitman and Ginsberg, the Civil War poems, the Henry Zender poem on the Detroit River, the Cohen poem, the Sam Spade poem at the Italian patisserie.

Where the occasion welcomes it, I bring a manual typewriter to the lectern.

For booking: please write with proposed dates, audience size, and the kind of room you have in mind.

Four

Unmechanized Writing

This one needs a sentence of its own. Unmechanized writing means writing by hand and by manual typewriter — pencil, fountain pen, Royal Deluxe, margins, mailed pages — in a practice that refuses, for the hours of the work, the speed of the machine. It is not a nostalgia. It is a way of letting the line of breath catch up to the line of thought.

I keep a Royal Deluxe of the sort Hemingway sat in front of in the late evenings, and a small drawer of pencils. I will share what I’ve learned about it with anyone who wants to try.

Formats include:

• Correspondence sessions · we exchange drafts by mail for a season; I write back longhand or on the Royal Deluxe.
• A day at the desk · an in-person session in Marquette: morning of writing by hand, afternoon of reading aloud what we found.
• The unplugged residency · for the writer who would like to spend a stretch of days inside the practice, with daily check-ins and shared reading.