Writing in the Bog

 

Saturday, August 16, 2025

Writing In the Bog Workshop

Workshop facilitated by Sheila Packa

10:00 am- 3:00 pm Meeting in the Lois King Education Center at the Zim Sax Bog, 8793 Owl Avenue, Toivola, MN 55765 (see directions below). 

Course Fee: $60/non-members (includes a FOSZB membership); $40/FOSZB members and Minnesota Master Naturalists

Activity Rating: 1

Join writer Sheila Packa for this eco-writing workshop at the Sax-Zim Bog. This will be a workshop for writers interested in crafting stories or poems with a strong ecological or environmental emphasis. The bog is a useful metaphor for the creative process, whether you are a beginner or an experienced writer. Sometimes it’s a slog. We have difficulty finding our way. The bog helps us to slow down, and at some point, cross a threshold into a creative flow. The sense of time is altered. We hope you will join us!

This generative workshop will begin with writing about the landscape. It might be the bog or perhaps another place that has marked you. Barry Lopez thought the external landscape greatly affects our psyche, or internal landscape. He says the internal landscape develops as we grow up in or live within a particular place, and our life reflects that its contours and relationships.  Using a variety of guided writing exercises, participants will have time to brainstorm, do a few writing exercises, and have discussion. As your story emerges, we will look at how to let it grow organically. Last, we will review  quick editing tips. At the end of the day, those that would like to share excerpts of their work will have an opportunity to do so.

There is no better time that now to write about landscape and the environment. Whatever you write will make it stronger! 

Sheila Packa, formerly Duluth’s Poet Laureate. All four of her immigrant grandparents settled in Zim, Sax, Toivola, and Forbes in the early 1900s. Her recent books, Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range and Surface Displacements. She edited “Migrations,” an anthology of 75 Lake Superior area writers writing about change and transitions. All of these books explore the histories and landscape of northern Minnesota. Sheila has taught Composition and Creative Writing at Lake Superior College and in the community. To learn more about Sheila and her works/style check out her website: https://sheilapacka.com/

Registration is now open!

Head over to our website to register: Writing in the Sax-Zim Bog

or

https://secure.lglforms.com/form_engine/s/n-Knzf_3qFtyb7Gaq6St2g

Map: https://saxzim.org/plan-your-visit/#wcdirections

The Line of Descent

Forrest Gander has a very powerful poem, "Line of Descent."  To say that it is rooted in the landscape is inadequate. Instead I would say that it rises out of and falls into the landscape,  as it captures a moment of immense beauty and wrenching danger.  

Ecopoetry is not nature poetry. It has little connection to the pastoral, but it does honor landscape. Ecopoetry is environmental, which expresses a shift from anthropomorphic to earth-centric perspectives. It aims to shift the consciousness away from human dominion over animals and the earth toward a more comprehensive awareness of the birthing, growing, diminishing and dying world that we participate in. It acknowledges the immensity of our surrounding landscape. It yields an understanding of resilience and fragility as our environment is altered by extraction, contaminants, and unsustainable practices. It gives us the ability to vision survival, renewal, and honoring of the waters, the plants, the animals and birds, the fields and slopes, the stones and the air.  We eat it and we breathe it. Our environment enters, changes, leaves, and still remains in our bodies. 

Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in California. With degrees in geology and literature, he taught at Harvard University and Brown University. Gander is a translator and the author of many books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Besides the Pulitzer Prize, he’s received the Best Translated Book Award and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations.

In The Creative Independent interview, he says

...in Arkansas, where I lived in a very rural place, if you’re walking with someone down a dirt road with a hump in it, you’re separated, there’s a caesura between you. You’re looking at them, but behind them is a screen of trees, and behind the trees there’s a mountain, and those ways of conversing and seeing I think do affect our language.

Heiddeger has that nice short little book called Conversation on a Country Path where he talks about how walking with someone, you literally are sharing a vision and the pace, and that kind of walking changes if you’re in the city or if you’re in the country. I think an attentiveness to the way that place influences and is a part of human perception is something that we haven’t always taken into account.

There’s the tradition of Sangam poetry in southern India, which means convergence. And one of the two poetries that developed from that, called Akam, is this big body of poetry in which it was considered not only unethical, but really impossible to write about human subjectivity or your feelings without taking into account the world immediately around you, which was influencing you in all sorts of ways that you might not have wanted to admit.

The writing that we need is writing that opens our minds and makes us value the ground beneath our feet.  Ganders' "Line of Descent" creates that moment between a child and his father and life and death in that last line. It suspends us -- we don't know the outcome.  

 

The Crying

Thank you to Finnish musician Emmi Kuitinen for sharing her research and practice. She brought her knowledge of the tradition of laments to the participants of a workshop sponsored by the Finnish American Folk School in April 2025. Ms Kuitinen also has adapted the lament into hauntingly beautiful songs.  

In the past in Karelia, the lament was a necessary ritual. Death was a continuation of life, a journey into the hereafter. It was important to lament, or sing the dirge, to accompany the deceased on their journey, to remind the deceased of their transition. The lament also was intended to prevent the deceased from coming back as a ghost and/or bringing diseases. The itkettäjä is the person who performs the lament. The literal meaning of this word is "the one who makes you cry."  

The lament was not only for deaths. There were wedding laments. These occurred during the engagement period prior to the marriage and sung at the bride's house. Laments were made for conscripts in the military. In Russia, the service in the army lasted from five to twenty years. The mother lamented for her son. Also, there were occasional laments for certain occasions. For instance, to say thank you or to express the loss experienced as a refugee. Many lament-performers of the past would not allow recordings nor would they perform a lament disconnected from death or the serious situation for which it was intended.   

A lament is a crying with the voice, and it is not considered singing. However, it does have a set form. Nothing is said directly -- metaphors are used instead. The melody and rhythm vary, but often the lament has a descending melody characterized by improvisation and variation.  Lament language has some common elements: a free meter, parallelism, alliteration, and the use of diminutives and plurals.   

Many cultures besides Karelian culture had laments. It is an old tradition in the Middle East and in many places across the continents.

People believed if the bride didn't cry at the wedding, she would cry for the rest of her life.  Loss is part of every life, and perhaps the lament is needed in order to hold and release grief. It must be heard by others before we can go forward. A good lament makes the listener cry.  

Here is Mathilde ter Heijne - Lament, Song for Transitions post by Olaf Stueber: 

 https://vimeo.com/87757291?&login=true#_=_

Link to Emmi Kuitinen's music: Surun Synty

Please buy her album!  

The Lament

 The Lament 

Emmi Kuittinen will be leading an online (Zoom) workshop on the Karelian lament form on April 5 & 6, 2025 sponsored by the Finlandia Foundation and the Finnish American Folk School. Register by clicking this link

Poetry has roots in the old traditions of lamentation, and I will be among the participants. 

In this online workshop you will get to know the lament tradition of Karelia and Ingria. Laments were sung in parting situations and in the most important rites of human life, like marriage and death. They were used to convey feelings of grief and yearning, and occasionally even those of gratitude. There were also laments for everyday life situations to relieve sorrow.

 website: https://emmikuittinen.com/surun-synty

Narrative Strategies

At the most basic level, writing begins with a person, a place, or a thing.

Fiction: a story which is an act of imagination. It uses character, point of view, voice, setting, image, and plot. Point of view might be omniscient, third person (or third person limited), second person, or first person. Dialogue reveals character and the character's agenda. Exposition shows a character’s thoughts.

Essay: The word essay refers to a walk, or walkabout. It can be personal or impersonal. It is
intended to inform or enlighten the reader about a topic. Essays might present an argument (and refute other points of view) or it might be an essay of definition, description, cause/effect, classification, or a blend of these. The best essays examine one of life’s unanswerable questions.

Memoir: a slice of life (as opposed to an autobiography). Memoir often takes a more artistic form or pattern. Vivian Gornick distinguishes between a situation and a story, and she recommends
that writer create a narrator that is a truth-teller, not to brag or to communicate that she has a handle on the truth, but rather she or he investigates her or his own motives and actions. The "voice" is unique and compelling. See George Orwell's: "Shooting an Elephant," and James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son."

Poetry: can be narrative or simply imagistic, but it is a ‘patterned language.’ It has a sound
pattern (like alliteration, assonance, rhythm, rhyme, or figurative elements (metaphor) or a visual
pattern in its images or form. Paul Valery said the difference between poetry and prose is physiological. It is more connected to breath and oral tradition and sometimes ritual. The language of the poem is memorable, and the white space after line breaks and stanza breaks often are there to guide the breath and pace. The language in a poem is meant to create new meaning each time it is read, but the language of prose is meant to fall away once the meaning is delivered. 

Some poetry is “formal,” meaning it uses an established format like the sonnet which has a prescribed number of stanzas, lines and syllables per line, and the lines are in iambic meter (the heart beat rhythm). There are also other meters (trochaic, anapest, etc) and forms like villanelle, pantoum, ghazal, etc. Blank verse doesn’t have a specified form, line length, rhyme or stanza requirements, but it does iambic meter. Free verse refers to a poem without established patterns. The poet creates his or her own pattern.

Forms

ABC : The alphabet is used as the organizing principle. It’s A-Z. In poetry, it is called an
abecedarium and is a very old form often used for laments.

Advertisement: For example, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Yours can be like a commercial or a personals ad.

The Argument: the writing has a focus to persuade; examine other points of view and their limitations (to refute), and to promote one's idea and provide supports for that idea. See Lydia Davis's short fiction: "Letter to a Funeral Director"

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula Le Guin: a story of novel as a container or carrier bag:
https://stillmoving.org/resources/the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction

Curriculum Vitae: Use the form of a resumé for an autobiography. See poet Lisel Mueller’s
“Curriculum Vitae” https://poets.org/poem/curriculum-vitae

Character Sketch: This form was popular during the Progressive Era (early 1900s) and often
used by communistic/socialist publications. It’s a portrait of an individual without necessarily
adding a plot.

Chronology of events: events told in the order these have occurred

Cinematic: list of screen shots, a camera close-up, a camera long-distance view

Collage: assemblage of diverse elements (like “Just Add Water” exercise). Combine images, text
fragments, sensory details, and whatever else you like

Confession: An act of enumerating one’s failings in order to gain forgiveness and
understanding.

Comparison/Contrast: see Natalia Ginzburg: "He and I"

Classification: often used in essay to describe sub-types of a subject

Creation story: how things came to be; the beginning of the universe/world

Definition: explains something using description and classification. It can also use comparison,
contrast, and example.

Description: to provide a strong visual picture

Dream: One piece of advice: Do not end with “and then I woke up.” Let the mystery or dream
logic be.

Epistolary: using the form of a letter (or letters)

Fable: a brief story (usually about animals) that teaches a lesson, fables often use animals as the story's characters

Fairytale: a story might connect to a myth, Biblical story, urban myth, or well known cultural
story (Wizard of Oz, or It’s a Wonderful Life, Elvis)

Fantasy: a storytelling which features magic, the supernatural, or mythical beings; the setting can be past, present or future on earth or alternative universes

Graphic: graphic novels depend on both images & some text

Hybrid form: a combination of narrative forms or any of the modes of telling: a combination of fiction/nonfiction/essay

Instructions or Recipe: A how-to-do something

Inventory or List: Imposing a limitation on a piece of writing can sometimes yield excellent
results. It serves to focus a story, essay, or poem. Lorrie Moore, in her book Self Help, has
several fictional stories based on lists: “The Kids Guide to Divorce” and “How to Talk to Your
Mother.”

Letter: In a letter, a writer often can find an intimate voice, if it is to a friend. For an example of
a letter, see Lydia Davis’ “Letter to a Funeral Parlor.”

Narrative Verse: a story or legend told in poetry form, using line breaks, stanzas, and possibly attention to rhyme and meter

Prose poem: a brief writing that looks like prose (because it doesn't use line/stanza breaks) but often borrows other characteristics of poems: metaphors, images, sound patterns, manipulations of time, or associational leaps

Snapshot: one image, one moment, like a photograph

Travelogue: This describes a trip or journey, and not just the external places (things to see, places to go, foods) but generally, the internal trip or journey of the writer

Vignette: usually a page, a brief story

Workshop: Writing the Story

 

Writing the Story in Poetry, Fiction, Or Memoir

Writers' Workshop

Got a story? Of course you do!  There is a variety of narrative techniques used by writers in poetry, fiction, and memoir to draw in the reader.  Come join in this Zoom workshop, four Tuesday evenings (7:00 to 8:30 pm) February 17-March 11, 2025. The workshop is sponsored by Lake Superior Writers.  Participants will develop their own stories and, using guided prompts, experiment with various narrative techniques. It's going to be fun!  

Register Here https://lakesuperiorwriters.org/writing-the-story/

Sheila Packa is a fiscal year 2024 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. 

The Rose Warner Series at the College of St. Scholastica 2025

Every year the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth hosts the Rose Warner Reading Series. This year is on January 31, 2025 and the featured poet is Kimiko Hahn. She was also hold a reading in the evening for the general public.  In conjunction with this is a half-day conference for high school students. I'll be leading two break-out sessions for student writers along with two other Writers of Distinction, Marie Zhuikov and Nick Trelstad. 

Students register here: https://sites.google.com/css.edu/2025rosewarnerreadingserieskim/register

Kimiko Hahn is author of ten collections of poetry, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2024) which plays with given forms while creating new ones, and, in doing so, honors past writers. Her last collection, Foreign Bodies, revisits the personal as political while exploring the immigrant body, the endangered animal’s body, objects removed from children’s bodies, and hoarded things. Previous books Toxic Flora and Brain Fever were prompted by fields of science; The Narrow Road to the Interior takes title and forms from Basho’s famous journals. Reflecting her interest in Japanese poetics, her essay on the zuihitsu was published in the American Poetry Review.

In 2023, Kimiko was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and received The Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. Additional honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, American Book Award, and NEA Fellowships. In her service to the field, she enjoys promoting chapbooks and has created a chapbook archive at the Queens College Library. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.