Please join us at Metrotech in OKC from 6:30 to 8:30 PM on Wednesday, May 15 as we welcome Oklahoma essayist, journalist, and Tulsa Artist Fellow Liz Blood, who will present her interactive session "Borrowed Forms: Using the Ordinary to Get to the Extraordinary" as our monthly series of free creative writing workshops continues. (Visit ralphellisonfoundation.org/cww/ for complete information.) This workshop will explore how the seemingly-boring world of formalities like mortgage payoff letters and orthodontic reports is actually rich, fertile soil for writing. Poets and prose writers alike are welcome! We will practice using existing forms to act as a container for your writing and will consider what stories or meditations various forms suggest. This will be a craft and generative workshop with discussion and writing prompts. Don’t do any work ahead of time, but do bring pen, paper, and a form that is personal to you—perhaps a bank statement, resume, note, prescription, birth certificate, field guide, horoscope, etc. (There are no “wrong” forms.) Please note the break from our usual location. THIS SESSION HAS BEEN RELOCATED TO METROTECH, just north along MLK from the Ellison Library (closed this month for renovation). As always, all writers of high-school age and older are welcome, and attendance is free. The Ralph Ellison Foundation is proud to partner with the Red Earth MFA in Creative Writing at OCU, Short Order Poems, and OKC's Metropolitan Library System in presenting this workshop series as well as with our hosts at Metro Technology Centers for this workshop.
Liz Blood is an essayist, journalist, and editor whose work focuses on place, memory, contemporary art, and social justice. Her work has appeared in HuffPost, Sierra, Oklahoma Today, AWP Writer’s Chronicle, Hunger Mountain, The Tulsa Voice, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Ekphrasis, a poetry and art column at Art Focus Oklahoma, contributing editor at Awst Press, former editor of The Tulsa Voice, and is an adjunct faculty member at The Red Earth MFA in Creative Writing program at Oklahoma City University, where she teaches fiction and nonfiction.