Evanston Public Library hosted a Poetry Playspace event, inviting participants to learn about poetry and write together, in collaboration with the Evanston Writer’s Workshop on Tuesday evening.
The event was one of the first installments of EPL’s Summer Writing Challenge, which encourages participants to log 45 hours of writing this season.
EPL Library Assistant Jeff Hester is a part of the team organizing the summer challenge, and he administered the poetry-writing space. Having studied poetry in college, Hester said he chose to build Tuesday’s event “from the ground up.”
“Writing can be intimidating, especially poetry,” he said. “But it’s also ideal for play and expression. There are guidelines in poetry, but they are not the law.”
Hester told attendees that the event — and the Summer Writing Challenge series overall — are designed to lower the barriers to writing. He said the library is hoping to reach a diverse and widely-ranging audience with the series.
To the room of 16 participants, Hester handed out colorful mini notebooks, pens and papers explaining different styles of short-form poetry, including the haiku, senryu and haibun. He also provided prompts tailored to each form.
Hester said participants should feel free to embrace the rules and formats but also to disregard them.
“Rules are made to be broken with writing,” he said.
Participants spent half an hour writing, experimenting with forms and rule breaking while flipping through the library’s poetry books, which were distributed for inspiration.
Attendees Liz Kruse and Heather Porteous have been friends since they were 10 years old, and writing has always been a part of their relationship. Porteous, visiting from Spain, said she heard about the event when she arrived in Evanston and told Kruse about it, so the two attended together.
“Over the years, we did much growing up and writing together,” Kruse said. “I love the community that comes with writing. Language is meant to be shared.”
As a teacher at Chicago’s Catherine Cook School, Kruse said she hopes to find time over the summer to do things for herself, including more writing.
Similarly, Porteous said she hopes to reawaken her artistic and creative side, whether through art, music or writing. She said she knew the library’s staff would thoughtfully organize the poetry event.
“I knew they would put our community in safe hands,” Porteous said.
After writing, several participants chose to read their poems aloud. Kruse went first, reading a poem about her mom. She said she used the different provided forms as inspiration before settling on one that helped her best express what she hoped to convey.
Other participants shared poems about the new generation of “iPad Babies,” nature and the Fourth of July, with one participant reciting her work in French. Participants discussed each other’s poems and unpacked the different ways they’d experimented with language.
Hester said he hopes people gained a sense of confidence in themselves and their writing, adding that he wants writers to feel comfortable playing around with different styles and rules.
He said the participants made the library a “beautiful place to be.”
“The event went really well,” Hester said. “Whether people learned much or not, these events and the library can be creative and fulfilling resources for people.”
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