Workshop: Beginning with the Thing In-Person
A writing workshop as part of the 2026 To Taste Life Twice Seminar - three days of author talks and writing workshop. Registration is limited to 15 participants.
Instructor: Robert Wrigley
The great Anton Chekhov was supposed to have said something like “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of its light on broken glass!” If Chekhov did say that, no one knows where. But it’s excellent advice. William Carlos Williams said “No ideas but in things!” His notion is that poems do not come from ideas but from the senses—you write poems with your body more than with your mind. Although it’s worth observing that “no ideas but in things” is, well, an idea.
What this workshop means to illustrate is a bit more practical. How do you get started, even if you don’t have any idea where you’re going? You begin with the thing. A thing. Anything—any thing—will do. The thing will matter because you chose to begin writing from it, but the plan is to let that thing, and its contemplation, lead to something more.
We’re going to look at poems that begin with things, objects, stuff. But where they go will be something else entirely. Such poems can go, as you will see, almost anywhere.
It’s a generative workshop. We’ll write . . . about things.
- Date:
- Friday, May 8, 2026
- Time:
- 2:00pm - 5:00pm
- Time Zone:
- Mountain Time - US & Canada (change)
- Location:
- John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall
- Campus:
- The Community Library
- Audience:
- Adults
- Categories:
- Classes & Discussions Seminars & Conferences
Robert Wrigley has published twelve books of poetry, most recently The True Account of Myself As a Bird. He is also the author of a collection of essays, Nemerov’s Door. A former Kingsley Tufts Award winner, a Guggenheim and two-time NEA fellow, he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho, and lives in the woods north of Moscow, Idaho, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes.