Yes, there were writing workshops!

The Snapshots section on this site includes photos of me and Bob reading, but so far I’ve written nothing about the main reason we were invited to Tbilisi.

Before the program started, all participants submitted up to ten pages of poetry, works in progress for which they wanted suggestions. These were assembled into a package that every participant received. Every couple of days while we were there, we had to read and comment on 20-40 pages of poetry from group members. We wrote down our feedback on the poems, so that each author would have it to take home with them.

Here is a rundown of a typical day at Writers' House. Three times a week our group (and there was another one for fiction) met at 10:30 a.m. for about two and a half hours of work. (That sounds like a late start, but Tbilisi comes alive at night when the temperature drops and people stay up late and get up late.) Sometimes we dove right into discussing some of the submitted work, and sometimes the instructor, the New York poet Ariana Reines, started us off reading and discussing features of a famous poem of one sort or another. Each person read their set of poems out loud and then the table was opened up to general discussion of the particular poems we decided we wanted to focus on.

Afternoons varied. Sometimes local guest lecturers were brought in to talk informally about topics like Georgian architecture, film, or literature. All the lectures were fabulous and left us wanting more. Sometimes one of the faculty or another local writer ran a short seminar on how certain types of writing work, offered one-on-one time, or set us up in a location designed to facilitate free writing.

Most weekday evenings there were free, public readings by local writers at Writers' House, to which local residents sometimes also came. One evening featured the engaging, young Ukrainian poet (and musician, filmmaker, you name it) Oleksandr Fraze-Franzenko, who read his work followed by translations into English read by the translator herself, who happened to be a member of our poetry workshop. Another night we were treated to the dynamic and popular Georgian poet Shota Iatashvili. A couple of evenings were dedicated to readings by the faculty. One evening towards the end was an open mic night for both the fiction and poetry participants at which we could read five minutes of whatever we wanted, published or unpublished.

On the days without morning workshops we had our homework to do, and in the afternoons there were often group excursions to a museum or other place of local interest. Or we could go exploring on our own. The one full weekend we were there, two all-day group excursions were planned to mountainous regions outside of Tbilisi. Stay tuned for more posts about some of these trips!