Pen and Ink Poetry Club for teens is a weekly poetry club to gather, collect and share your creative self with others who love to share, explore, write, and create poetry.  

There will be three components to these classes; a warm up interactive poetry word game, a sharing session to circulate ideas, and our reading session where you perform / read / share your written words.

We will gather weekly and work from a different word or theme.  I will share the word or theme with you before hand and give you a chance to get creative and compose a piece you would like to share in our weekly get-together.  The themes will be quite general, such as a color or place, and you could interpret these in your own personal way, choosing to explore it through your own tones and poetry approach.  Anything is possible!  Get creative and, the most important thing, stay true to your style.  

In our sharing session, we pass around ideas and personal experiences of how we write our poems, what fills us up, where do we write the best, what tools we may have used to help our creativity, what inspires us to write, how we navigate blocks (if and when they come) and any other ideas we have found which may help others to tap in to their creative poetical side.  

You will have a chance to share the poetry you have created using your own personal style, expression and approach through your presentation.  This is not competitive nor is it a space of criticism or judgment, it is purely to gather poets around and share our love for words and meanings.  This is a class about sharing and lifting others up.  It takes a lot of courage to perform or recite a piece of your own work to strangers.  I have created this space as a safe space to do so.  

Weekly session topics: (These topics are a rough guide.  If students wish to be independent, this is highly encouraged.  If students wish to change a topic one week to something they are more interested in, this is encouraged as well.  This guide is meant to bring motivation and challenge as well as fun and creativity.)
Week 1 :  Fire
Week 2 : Earth
Week 3 : Water
Week 4 : Air
Week 5 : Moon / Sun
Week 6 : Shadows
Week 7 : Colors
Week 8 : Movement (wind, waves, etc.)
Week 9 : Power of Words
Week 10 : Community
Week 11 : Power of Pen & Paper
Week 12 : Antithesis (love / hate, light / dark, loud / quiet....)

I look forward to seeing you at the next poetry session.