About the Project

To feel betrayed by body, or to feel we have betrayed it, is a natural reaction to serious illness or injury. This workshop provides an opportunity to read and write poems that focus on the body, that allow us to explore its hidden crannies and grottoes, to reconnect.

Guided by specific writing projects and models poems, participants discover their individual processes as they create art from their experiences, calling upon both memory and imagination.

Suitable for beginning and advanced writers—we each start from the place we find ourselves now. All that is required is a desire to travel further, a willingness to dive beneath the skin of daily life, a feeling that Yes, perhaps I can try this. The purpose of our work is to support the healing and nurturing of the physical soul.

Ongoing since 2001, the workshop meets for three sessions each year: fall, winter/spring and summer. Up to 10 participants gather at the dining room table of instructor Anne Becker, in Takoma Park, MD, for three hours late Sunday afternoons, five times (usually two weeks apart) in each session.

Anne Becker is a poet, teacher and producer of Watershed Tapes, award-winning recordings of major American and international poets reading their work, including Nobel Laureates, Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz. Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, MD, she teaches at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, as well as poetry tutorials for those putting books together. Her books include The Transmutation Notebooks: Poems in the Voices of Charles and Emma Darwin, and The Good Body.