All Words Are Magic Words: Riddles, Spells, and Hyperdiction: A Craft Talk with Joyelle McSweeney

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | This reading will be held in Barn 024.

"If it can't be done but it must be done then it will be done–by magic."
– Kathy Acker. 

Through a series of guided readings, discussions, and exercises, each participant will move closer to that sonorous, eclectic, variegated, dissonant and volatile "word hoarde" that is most immediately their own–then employ this clamorous, beguiling hyperdiction to write equally dynamic poems that act in and on the world and invite new worlds into being.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama, and prose, most recently Death Styles (Nightboat, 2024), a daybook contending with the loss of a newborn child and Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), which was called "frightening and brilliant" in the New Yorker and received the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize. With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits Action Books, an international press of innovative American literature and world literature in translation. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in South Bend, Indiana, and teaches at Notre Dame.