Where the Brain and Universe Meet: Making Poems, Making Books with Anita Skeen and Cindy Hunter Morgan – G24100304
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Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet. –Paul Klee
Musicians use the names of colors to talk about music. People use the names of colors to describe emotions. How does the concept of color inform our thinking? How does it inform our writing and our art? Alice Walker writes about The Color Purple, Abraham Verghese wrote The Color of Water. Georgia O’Keeffe paints “Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue. Poet Maggie Nelson uses the color blue to explore meaningful parts of her own life in her book Bluets. Various poets have used color as scaffolding for poems. How might color be used to help you reflect on your life? What does color mean to you? How does it affect your life? How might an exploration of one color lead to deeper ways of thinking about other things? In this writing and book making course taught by two poet-book artists, we’ll explore these questions through our texts, which we will make into small books, and we’ll work to understand how color is at work inside of us. Participants will be encouraged to keep notes on what they notice about color on the Ranch, among their friends, in their own lives and this world, and we will discover how thinking about color opens opportunities for creating poetry and art.
Instructors
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Anita Skeen
Anita Skeen is currently Professor Emerita in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University where she is the Founding Director of The Center for Poetry. and currently the Series Editor for Wheelbarrow Books. She taught students in kindergarten through high school while working with the Kansas Arts Commission’s Artist in the Schools Program; in traditional venues such as college classrooms as a Visiting Writer and Writer in Residence; and in senior citizens’ centers, libraries, and at Ghost Ranch. She has been the Coordinator of the Creative Arts Program at Ghost Ranch for 41 years, and the Fall Writing Festival for 23 years.
Anita is the author of six volumes of poetry: Each Hand A Map (1986); Portraits (1990); Outside the Fold, Outside the Frame (1999); The Resurrection of the Animals (2002); Never the Whole Story (2011); When We Say Shelter (2007), with Oklahoma poet Jane Taylor; and The Unauthorized Audubon (2014), a collection of poems about imaginary birds accompanied by the linocuts of anthropologist/visual artist Laura B. DeLind.. With Taylor, she co-edited the literary anthology Once Upon A Place: Writings from Ghost Ranch (2008). Her poetry, short fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies.
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Cindy Hunter Morgan
Cindy Hunter Morgan is the author of Far Company (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and Harborless (Wayne State University Press), which was a 2018 Michigan Notable Book and the winner of the 2017 Moveen Prize in Poetry. She also is the author of two chapbooks, Apple Season (Midwest Writing Center Chapbook Award, 2012) and The Sultan, The Skater, The Bicycle Maker (Ledge Press Chapbook Award, 2011). She teaches creative writing at Michigan State University, where, for several years, she also taught book arts. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals, including Tin House Online, Passages North, Salamander, Sugar House Review, and West Branch. For several years, she was a regular contributor for Murder Ballad Monday, a blog devoted to the exploration of the murder ballad tradition in folk and popular music. She is a co-founder of FILMETRY: A Festival of Film and Poetry. She leads various poetry workshops and book arts workshops. Her artist’s books are held in private collections and in Murray & Hong Special Collections at Michigan State University Libraries, the Zhang Legacy Collections Center at Western Michigan University, and the Rolvaag Library Special Collections at St. Olaf College. She is a recipient of a 2024 Quarry Farm Fellowship and will spend two weeks this summer living in Mark Twain’s house in Elmira, New York. She will use that time to complete an artist’s book engaged with Twain’s work.