Residency Day 1 – A Quick Blurb

Day one of the residency is almost at a close. We’re on a quick break before the student reading and I wanted to pop over here.

WOW! What an amazing first day! I have two new pieces written out of inspiration from the lectures, the reading we had last night that started the residency, and from the sheer inspiration of beginning the second year of this program. I have a couple of my assignments already finished and turned in, so hopefully that will allow my a little wiggle room going into the rest of the residency.

I’m struggling a little right now with what to call my work. I started out as a prose student; I have, after last semester, focused entirely on poetry and so thought I’d be working on poetry for this semester, and now I’m wondering if, perhaps, I’m cross genre? I’m not into drawing or text as image or painting or photography or anything like that (not in this program, anyway; I explore some text:image play on my Instagram), which is why I’m hesitant to claim cross genre, but in skimming through some of my material from the first semester, I can see that I have a lot of content that is very lyrical in my prose. Some of it may be poetry or essay as poetry or poetry as essay.

I’m not sure it really matters at this point because I intend to work through all of this with my faculty mentor, but it is on my mind.

One of the lectures today focused on the use of the seasons in our work. I am endlessly fascinated by nature writing, even though so much of it tends to be cliche and generic (and I say that without judgment because my nature writing almost universally is both of those things), so I’m curious how utilizing the prompts we were given will alter/impact not only my work as it exists now, but new material that I generate moving forward. Wednesday we get the day off, so I might take that time to go to the river or out into the woods to meditate on these prompts and see what new material I can create with these fresh access points.

That’s my update!

Oh! I’m currently at 337 poems for the year and I’m almost 19,000 words for CampNaNoWriMo!

Published by rileydanvers

I am a poet and an author living in Portland, OR. I graduated in 2016 with my A.S. in English; in 2018 with my B.A. in English Literature and Writing; in 2021 with my M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and in 2023 with my M.A. in Literature. In 2015, I received my first publication credit. In 2022, my debut collection of poetry, Even the Air, Too Heavy, was published by First Matter Press. In 2023, I published my debut fantasy novel, A Kiss of Glass. I publish fiction under J. D. Brubaker. I publish poetry under Riley Danvers. And I publish my Instagram poetry under R.J.D.D.

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