Writing the Form-Form
Thursday, May 21, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm · Carnegie Learning Centre
This generative workshop invites participants to explore personal history and identity through the introduction of the Form-form in poetry—writing memoir-based poems using the structure of job, legal, and government applications as a starting place to explore identity. Writers will learn how to transform forms and applications from places of anxiety to places of creative inspiration.
Facilitator: Holly Flauto
HOLLY FLAUTO
Holly Flauto’s book of poetry, Permission to Settle (Anvil Press), was named as one of CBC Books’ Best Canadian Poetry of 2024. In the book, the blanks from the application for Permanent Residency are filled in with a series of memoir-based poems that investigate the implicit biases in the colonial system of boxes and check marks that still seek to categorize “the other” and to harness it in the face of reconciliation. Holly grew up moving between the US and South America; she immigrated to Canada in 2008 and now lives and writes on the traditional, ancestral and stolen territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Holly teaches writing in the English department at Capilano University.