Rivers and Bridges: The Way We Move Through and Toward | Gailmarie Pahmeier and Courtney Cliften | Saturday | May 11th 2024

This workshop will encourage participants to write about and consider the “ancient and deeply American quest, the search for home,” to quote poet George Bilgere. For example, how does our culture encourage, or discourage, physical relocation and personal reinvention? We’ll use the metaphor of rivers during our discussion, how water moves us from place to place, sustains and nurtures and cleanses us, both literally and metaphorically. The metaphor of bridges also resonates the literal and the metaphoric—how do we cross from one place or identity into another? What are the obstacles such movement presents? And ultimately, how do we define home? As Norman Maclean famously wrote, “all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” 

Workshop coordinators Gailmarie Pahmeier and Courtney Cliften will share their own work in addition to some from poets they admire, and they’ll offer prompts to help you generate your own poems. 

Bio Notes: Gailmarie Pahmeier is a native of Missouri, a place whose history is both rich and troubling.  She recalls many visits, with church groups and Girl Scouts, to Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, grew up thinking that Missourians “owned” Mark Twain. Gailmarie is emeritus faculty at UNR and currently teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at UNR/Tahoe. Widely published, she recently served the state of Nevada as Poet Laureate, the first to be appointed to that position in 50 years. Courtney Cliften is a Nevada native with a deep and palpable curiosity about what it means to a Nevadan, a complicated identity for so many. She earned her MFA in Poetry at UNR and now teaches in their English Department. Her work has appeared in The Meadow, Helen Literary Magazine, An Anthology of Emerging Poets, The Hunger, The Racket, Caustic Frolic and more.