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Songs of Ourselves is a 5 month certificate program that draws equally upon the Craft of Poetry and the life-transforming potential of Narrative Therapy. We will work on writing authentically and powerfully from our lives, letting our poems take us on journeys of self-discovery, healing and new possibility. At the same time, we will pay close attention to the craft of poetry, revising, editing, and critiquing meticulously. The goal is always for poetic craft to reveal our deepest truths to us, and for our deepest truths to challenge and develop our poetic craft.

Over our time together, you will learn how to expand even the rawest feelings into well-crafted poems that communicate and move. You will leave the program with deep insights into poetic craft, the solid beginnings of a collection of poetry, and a community of peers and mentors who will cheer you on and offer you support for years to come.

Most importantly, you will leave writing poems that will change your life — because how else will they change anyone else’s?


Dates: 13 January, 2024 - 15 June 2024

Cost: Rs. 40,000 per person
Scholarships based on financial need are available. Make sure to mention it in your application if you would like to participate but cannot afford the fee.

Please note that this is not a therapy group, and I am not a therapist. The program is informed by my intensive study of Narrative Therapy, as well as my experiences working alongside therapists for nearly a decade, but this is still very much a writing workshop rather than a group therapy experience. The words you write here will enable some kind of healing and catharsis, even discovery and growth towards new possibilities, but our focus will remain on the words themselves. If you think you might need additional mental health support to navigate the program, please reach out to me, and I will connect you to therapists as well.

Registrations are currently closed for all my courses. Please sign up for my mailing list to stay in the loop about future courses.

COURSE COMPONENTS

  • We will meet every Saturday from 10:30 AM to 1 PM, from 13 January to 15 June, 2024. Twice a month, these sessions will be used for poetry critique and workshopping, and the other sessions will be distributed between reading groups and workshops with guest faculty.

  • In addition to our live workshops, you will also get access to a weekly video every Monday. Half of these will take you through a particular aspect of the Craft of Poetry, such as metaphor, image, music, enjambment etc. Each video will culminate in a writing exercise intended to generate new work and practise the craft element in question. You can return to these videos for the duration of the course, debrief them in our Zoom calls, and have an ongoing conversation about them in the comments.

  • We alternate weeks between focussing on Craft and focussing on the Narrative Therapy inspired components of this program. In the weeks when you are not working through a craft video, you will receive a writing prompt or guided exercise that moves your writing towards greater courage, authenticity, and vulnerability. The goal of these exercises is to support you on a journey of healing, self-discovery, and celebration, not just improve your poems, but they will improve your poems too! You will always have a space in which to share these new poems or exercises you are working on, but you will never be forced to do so. This will be your space to grow as you wish, quietly or in community.

  • I am bringing in several guest faculty members to maximise what you will gain from this program. Vikramaditya Sahai and Kuhu Joshi will be walking you through how to read poems for meaning as well as for craft; Akhil Katyal will work on the role of research in poetry and also on writing in form; Urvashi Bahuguna will do a workshop on poetry and mental health, Sohini Basak will work with you on how to edit poetry, and Rahul Soni will support you in how to put together a collection of poems and the things that publishing houses look for if you’d like to go that route someday. I cannot tell you how excited I am about this list: They are each independently amazing at what they do, and I feel so honoured to be able to bring them all together for you.

  • Each participant of the course will 2 one-on-one sessions of 30 minutes each to work with me on individual questions, clarifications, hopes and dreams, and where you want to go with your poems. The sign up sheet for these will be shared in the first week of the program.

  • Ultimately, the poetry you love to read will become your best teacher. For this course, all students will be invited to participate in creating our reading list, and we will work with guest faculty early in the course on how to read poetry. In later months, you will meet with a peer group once a month, reading together, discussing the poems, and coming back to the larger group with questions and ideas based on your reading.

  • Every week, you will be expected to turn in a short process journal, based on questions taken from Narrative Practices, so that you can begin developing a reflexive artistic practice, where you learn and grow from all of your experiences and struggles. Your peers and instructors will have an opportunity to reflect on and respond to these learning journals.

  • Twice a month, we will spend the bulk of our Zoom calls doing in depth critique of 3 students’ work using the Liz Lerman Critique process. In the process, you will not only get insights into your own work, but much more importantly, you will learn how to think about, revise, and edit poetry. Once we have practised the skill of offering useful critique for a few weeks, there will also be an ongoing discussion space for you to continue this process with peers as regularly as you would like.

  • “Songs of Ourselves” is located within The Make Space, a larger community I run for artists and writers. This means you will have access to ongoing discussion forums, chat rooms, and spaces to exchange work with your peers in this poetry course, as well as access to larger community events, including co-working sessions, additional workshops, and more.

  • On one hand, this course is not structured assuming everyone who wants to write also wants to publish. On the other hand, I am aware that publishing is something that a lot of writers aspire to, especially as they get deeper into craft and revisions. While we have not set aside specific sessions for publishing, we do have two guest faculty with extensive experience working in big as well as independent publishing houses, and I’m also happy to share my own insights and experiences in this regard. If you want to send focused time thinking about publishing, bring it up in our one-on-ones as well!

  • By the end of the program, you will have written and edited 15-20 poems each, and we will all have witnessed on another on a powerful poetic journey. We shall close with a graduation reading online, to which you can bring friends and family, and you will also have the option of creating small chapbooks to distribute at this closing celebration.

Walt Whitman’s iconic poem Song of Myself begins with the declaration: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” Throughout the poem, Whitman breaks every rule of poetry: Where his contemporaries in the 1800s wrote in formal verse and meter, he stretched his lines across pages. Where others had end-stopped rhymes, Whitman played with music, inventing his own. And where most contemporary poetry at his time focuses on kings or nightingales, Whitman’s poems included slaves, prostitutes, even the smell of his own armpits! His greatest contribution to contemporary poetry in English was not an individual poem; it was the way he exploded the walls of the poetic universe, welcoming in every kind of experience, every kind of person.

This is the spirit we are welcoming into our months together, where we will learn all the rules of what makes poetry work and also celebrate breaking them. Along the way, we will learn to “celebrate ourselves, sing ourselves,” and to show up for one another’s songs, humming a chorus or keeping a beat for someone when they need it— or simply, quietly, listening.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

  • For the foreseeable future, this program is completely online, mostly because it spans six months and includes guest faculty who are spread out all over the country and world! I will continue to offer shorter 4-5 day workshops and offline retreats, but I do not imagine being able to replicated the breadth and depth of this program in an offline space.

  • No. I have worked in therapy-adjacent spaces for years, such as leading youth groups alongside a team of therapists, and I have completed the South Asian Diploma in Narrative Practices. However, I am not a therapist myself, and I do not claim for this to be a therapy group. I am simply using ideas, approaches, and exercises inspired by Narrative Therapy to take you deeper into your own journeys of growth and healing, as well as deeper into your writing.

    If you find you need additional mental health support as you work your way through this program, I am happy to recommend therapists to you.

  • This course is intentionally designed to welcome you regardless of your previous experience with poetry. In fact, I have had folks who wrote their first ever poem in my workshop and have since gone on to publish books and win awards — but my goal is simply for you to find your way to poetry regardless of your current relationship to it.

  • On an average, plan on spending 5-7 hours a week on coursework, which includes the 2.5 hours of our weekly Zoom call, watching and responding to the weekly video, and engaging with the other activities on the channel. You could definitely spend a lot more time reading and responding to one another if you like, but this would be a good ballpark from which to begin.

  • I do ask for writing samples because it helps me gauge where everyone in the program is at, but I do not use them as a metric for whether you will be accepted to the program. This program is a space for growth, and I’m not invested in gatekeeping based on where you currently are in your writing. Feel free to leave out the writing sample from your application if you are worried about this part.

  • I can help you become a better writer and editor of your work, which is the most important step towards getting published. I am also happy to share my publishing knowledge and experience with you, and we will have two experienced publishers work with you in the last month of the program. All of this will certainly help you get published if that is something you want to move towards, but the program does not in and of itself guarantee any kind of publication

  • In general, I highly encourage you to be there for all the sessions because I do not work in a simple lecture format but instead focus on peer learning and discussions. However, over the course of the five months, I do expect your life to continue to happen, and it’s totally okay if you miss a session due to illness or emergencies. We will, as far as possible, share recordings of workshop sessions so that you can catch up on what you miss.

  • Unfortunately, no. Learning to write well takes time, and learning to trust a group enough to write with authenticity and honesty in their midst takes even longer. The program is intentionally long so that you have a chance to really delve deep into the work we are doing together and individually, so I’m afraid it is all or nothing here.

  • All participants who attend at least 75% of workshop sessions and turn in at least 75% of the assignments will receive a Certificate of Completion.

  • Yes! If you want to join us but cannot afford the full fee, please include this information in your application form. I may not be able to offer you a full waiver, but I do my best to accommodate every writer, regardless of ability to pay.

TESTIMONIALS

“I can say without hyperbole that Aditi’s workshop has been one of the most transformative spaces for me as a writer. It was where I learned to build my writing, in community, with Aditi as an instructor. “

Urvashi Bahuguna, Author of “Terrarium” and “No Straight Thing Was Ever Made”

“Aditi’s workshops have made me feel safe enough, held enough, and connected enough to write about traumatic and difficult things I would not have been able to write about in isolation.”

Kuhu Joshi, Poet and Professor, Author of “My Body Didn’t Come Before Me”

“I did Aditi’s writing workshops twice, and I think it’s the most transformative thing anyone can sign up for.”

Aishani Khurana, PhD Scholar

“Aditi’s workshops changed my life, personally and professionally. Not only did I find my voice but I also found many wonderful writing partners.”

Kandala Singh, MFA Candidate at University of Pittsburg

About the Facilitator

 

Aditi Rao

As a writer, I’ve published two full length collections of poetry, The Fingers Remember (Yoda Press 2014) and A Kind of Freedom Song (Yoda Press 2019), and I have just signed A Suitable Agency to represent my first non-fiction book. My poems and essays have been published widely, and my work has received national and international recognition through awards and fellowships, including the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, the Hedgebrook Residency, the Sangam House International Writers’ Residency, the Srinivas Rayaprol Prize for Poetry, the TFA Creative Writing in English award, the Muse India – Satish Verma Young Writer Award, and others

Over the last decade of teaching writing offline and online, I’ve also helped hundreds of people tell their stories, find their voices, and create meaningful writing friendships at all stages in their writing journeys. They all came in for different reasons, and all those reasons are equally important to me. I am of course proud of the young woman in my workshop who went to publish a book and win a major poetry prize, and of the man whose novel that began in my workshop was turned into a feature film, and of the woman who transitioned from an economist to a wonderful poet and went on to do a second masters degree, this time in creative writing. But I’m equally proud of the woman who wrote the story of a bad relationship over and over until she was able to break out of that story and become a prolific Marathi poet, and of the boy who had dropped out of college because of severe anxiety and wrote his way back to something like confidence and re-entered college, and the lawyer in her sixties who came to workshop after workshop just to gather the courage to share her stories with her family. I’m proud of the friendships I have seen grow out of this space, lasting for years beyond the workshop, and I’m proud of the ways in which participants are becoming better readers and more confident sharers. I can’t wait to welcome more of you into that fold!

Guest Faculty

Songs of Ourselves will be made richer and deeper through the insights and experiences of a fantastic range of poets, teachers, and editors, and I’m so excited to see what we can all build together that none of us could do alone. All of the faculty members below will have at least one 2-hour workshop session, focused on a specific aspect of poetry practice, such as reading critically, using research in poetry, writing formal poems, learning how to edit and put together a collection, and so on. They will also be available for questions and conversations after their sessions.

 

Akhil Katyal

Akhil Katyal is a writer, translator and scholar based in Delhi.

He is the author of Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems (Westland-Context) and How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross (TGIPC), for which he won the Editor's Choice Award from The Great Indian Poetry Collective. With Aditi Angiras, he co-edited The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia (HarperCollins India). He translated Ravish Kumar's Ishq Mein Shahar Hona as A City Happens in Love (Speaking Tiger). He has held the International Writing Fellowship at the University of Iowa and the Vijay Nambisan Poetry Fellowship at Sangam House.

Akhil completed his PhD at SOAS, University of London and his doctoral work was published as the monograph The Doubleness of Sexuality: Idioms of Same-Sex Desire in Modern India (New Text). He has also been a poetry columnist at The Times of India and ran a non-fiction column at the National Herald. He teaches in and coordinates the Creative Writing programme at Ambedkar University Delhi.

Read more here.

 

Rahul Soni

Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator. He is Associate Publisher, Literary, at HarperCollins India, where he has published a number of award-winning authors from Avni Doshi to Vinod Kumar Shukla, from Arshia Sattar to Madhuri Vijay, from Janice Pariat to S. Hareesh. He has previously been associated with the literary agency Writer's Side, the international writer's residency Sangam House, the international journal of translation Asymptote, and Almost Island, a journal of avant-garde writing. He was also co-founder of the pioneering multilingual literary journal Pratilipi, and its publishing imprint Pratilipi Books.

As a translator, his publications include a selection of Ashok Vajpeyi’s poetry, A Name for Every Leaf, Pankaj Kapur’s novella, Dopehri, Shrikant Verma’s Sahitya Akademi Award-winning poetry collection, Magadh, and International Booker Prize-winner Geetanjali Shree's novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet.

Read more here.

 

Urvashi Bahuguna

Urvashi Bahuguna is an Indian poet and an essayist who grew up in Goa. Her work has been recognised by a Tin House scholarship, a Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts residency, an Atlantic Centre for the Arts residency, a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship, a Sangam House fellowship, an Eclectica Spotlight Author Prize, and a TOTO Award for Creative Writing. 

She is the author of Terrarium (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2019) and No Straight Thing Was Ever Made (Penguin India, 2021). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, Tahoma Literary Review, The Adroit Journal, SWWIM, The Shore, Orion, Eclectica, Mud Season Review, UCity Review, SOFTBLOW, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets and elsewhere. She has been nominated for Best of The Net and the Pushcart Prize. She is a poetry reader for Four Way Review.

Her articles on culture, books, ecology and mental health have been published in Huffington Post India, Scroll, OPEN Magazine, The Hindu Business Line, FirstPost, LARB: China Channel and other publications.

Read more here.

 

Sohini Basak

Sohini Basak’s first poetry collection We Live in the Newness of Small Differences was awarded the inaugural International Beverly Manuscript Prize and published in 2018. Her poems have been anthologized widely, most recently by Penguin Press (India), Red Hen Press (USA), Emma Press (UK), and Math Paper Press (Singapore). She studied literature and creative writing at the universities of Delhi, Warwick, and East Anglia, where she received the 2015 Malcolm Bradbury Grant for Poetry. Other honours include a Toto Funds the Arts writing award (2017) and a Vijay Nambisan fellowship at Sangam House (2022).

In addition to writing, Sohini is an experienced editor. Most recently, she was a commissioning editor at HarperCollins India, where she acquired, edited, and published a list of literary titles, notably The World that Belongs to Us: Queer Poetry from South Asia edited by Aditi Angiras and Akhil Katyal, A God at the Door by Tishani Doshi (shortlisted for the Forward Prize), The Queen of Jasmine Country and others. Currently, Sohini works independently with writers, social justice organizations, and publishing houses in the UK, the USA, and India.

Read more here.

 

Vikramaditya Sahai (Vqueeram)

Vqueeram is a teacher and a writer. They have taught ways of reading, gender and sexuality, research methods, law and development at Ambedkar University, Delhi, National Law School, Bengaluru, National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata among other universities.

They live and love in Delhi.

Read more here.

 

Kuhu Joshi

Kuhu Joshi is the author of ‘My Body Didn’t Come Before Me’ (Speaking Tiger Books, 2023). She teaches at Pace University, Fordham University, and the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. She received her MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College where she was a Jane Cooper Poetry Fellow.

Kuhu’s work has received support from the Academy of American Poets, Napa Valley Writers Conference, the Teaching Artist Project, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poems have been published in the Poetry magazine, Four Way Review, SWWIM, Best New Poets, Yearbook of Indian Poetry, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and others. Her second manuscript, Mother Tongue, was a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press Immigrant Writing Series.

Kuhu currently lives in New York City, where she is also a plant mom, abstract artist, and yogi.

Read more here.