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Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process is an innovative volume of poetry and essays by twenty-five New York State poets who teach the writing of poetry, run poetry workshops and publish the poetry of others. The book is both a poetry anthology and an informal textbook with contributing essays by each poet that offers the reader personal insights and opinions about how poetry is created, crafted, and presented. Included are a wide array of prompts and exercises that these mentors use in their classes and workshops to stimulate the creative process in poets of all ages. Also added are basic ideas about how poets can best present their work in public readings. The book can be used as the focus for symposiums on teaching the writing of poetry as well as a textbook for high school and college students, adult and senior writers, and for those who run poetry workshops or reading series. 2018 | 172 pages
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Out of stockTeaching Toward Poetic and Imaginative Understanding In this collection of recent essays and reflections, Richard Lewis shares his pursuit of teaching as a means of deepening a child's poetic and imaginative understanding. He makes clear, through examples of his own teaching and the thoughts and writings of children, how much of what each child brings with them, as they play and imagine, dream and wonder, is a necessary and profound part of our human consciousness and creativity. And throughout he asks us to listen to the conversation each of us began in childhood, to the flight and stillness of our own imagining, to those understandings and learnings, in ourselves and in children, that continue to be the basis, the poetry, of who we are—and the nature we inhabit. "Poets and children are natural companions. The child dreams up worlds apart, without instruction, and the poet has never outgrown these childhood necessities. When Richard Lewis comes to visit, the classroom suddenly opens to a sky filled with celestial beings, and butterflies arrive to carry us to distant planets. It is but a short distance from the poet's imagery to a child's sense of joy and sadness, and we readers take flight with the children as they find the words that express their feelings. Once again, Mr. Lewis shows us the hidden world of childhood and makes us want to change our own classrooms into magical places."
—Vivian Gussin Paley, Teacher and author of, among others, A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play; and forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, The Boy on the Beach
Touchstone Center Publications in collaboration with Codhill Press
2010 | 128 pages
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Out of stockA Collection of Creative Nonfiction In Search Of offers a wide-angle lens into the craft of creative nonfiction in a unique collection by fourteen professional, academic, and student writers, whose stories traverse oceans and continents in the common search for identity and place. Haifa Mahabir is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the State University of New York, College at New Paltz. She has also studied in Paris at the Creative Writing Workshop of the Paris American Academy, and has twice received recognition as the Year's Best Young Writer in both 2008 and 2009 from Travelers' Tales/Solas House. Original cover and interior artwork by Brandon Boyd of Incubus.
Proceeds benefit the SUNY New Paltz Creative Writing Program.
2011 | 116 pages
