I’m excited to collaborate with my friend, photographer Emily Fitzgerald, to offer a creative course in early June for anyone—regardless of experience— interested in the interaction between words and images. We’ll offer exercises, ideas, technical assistance and new ways of thinking about how these mediums can tell us about ourselves and the world as we understand it. Consider joining us in western Massachusetts for this afternoon of creative play. The details follow.

Reflections Through Eye and Ink:

A creative course for writers and photographers (and anyone else with an urge to make meaning from what they see in the world)

When: Wednesday, June 5, 4-7 pm

Where: Northampton, MA (Details on our inspiring outdoor location provided at registration)

Do you want to be more creative with your words and images, fine-tune your skills at noticing the art of the everyday, or learn new techniques for translating your point of view through written and visual media?

Join hosts Holly and Emily for a three-hour creative course for anyone with a camera (any kind) and the urge to find and make meaning out of their ideas, visions and obsessions. This hands-on workshop includes plenty of time for making images, recording words, curating elements and shaping it all into a project.

We recommend this workshop for bloggers, poets, photographers, teachers, artists, yogis, dancers, therapists, healers, coaches, designers, anyone with a creative urge.

*Consider bringing a creative partner, collaborator or friend to share this day with you. Our goal is to provide you with tools and ideas so that our session sparks a longer term commitment to creative practice, whether for fun or professional purposes.

Cost: $20-45 sliding scale.

Registration deadline: June 1 (This really helps us prepare. Thanks.)

Once you have enrolled, we’ll send you additional information and a brief questionnaire to help us prepare for your arrival.

Contact hollywren@gmail.com or emily@efitzgerald.com with questions or to register.

Holly Wren Spaulding is a poet, teacher and member of LORE, a collaborative of women artists based in Michigan. She is the author of The Grass Impossibly, founder of Poetry Boot Camp and Poetry Forge, and studied creative writing at University of Michigan and Trinity College, Ireland. She works with artists and others through her personal consulting business, LIFE/form. http://www.thepoetryforge.com and www.lifeformguide.com

Emily Fitzgerald‘s work focuses on the human experience and bringing an awareness to the unspoken and unconscious aspects of life. My photographs aim to illuminate our relationship to each other, reflected through a single moment caught in time. I am fascinated by the way almost identical visual scenarios can reveal starkly contrasted emotions. Often there is an amazing depth that can be conveyed through the intensity in someone’s eyes, the tilt of a head, or the placement of a hand or an object on a table. I am interested in documenting both the commonality and uniqueness of our human experience. I am inspired by artwork that allows and encourages the interplay and the discussions that these polarities can generate. I am moved to create images when there is limited available light, using natural light to the extent that it enhances, supports or detracts from a scene. My journey with photography has taught me to meet my subjects as they are and explore the space between us, as full or empty as it may be. In important ways, even my landscape photography is about humanity and strives to bring awareness to the way in which humans influence the natural and constructed world.

What you will get from this experience: