Your July Forever (Poetry) Workshop Is Gonna be Hot and Heavy

Writing love & sex poems that will actually get published and have readers begging for more

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Hi! Last month we were funny, and this month? This month we will be sexy. Woah.

Your July instructor Shannan Mann is a poetry powerhouse (hot). She’s won tons of awards, co-founded the super popular poetry magazine ONLY POEMS, been published in a bunch of other super popular poetry magazines and is an absurdly brilliant and generous human being.

We format these workshops a little bit ahead of time to make sure they’re perfect for you and to save ourselves from getting stressy, so I’ve seen the first half of the curriculum and just, ahhh she’s going to spoil you.

Okay, here’s what lies ahead…

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Love poems are the villain origin story of poetry. Once an outlet to let out all your repressed angst and lust in times when all of that stuff was kept under literal wraps. Today, it’s a little easier to love freely but when it comes to lit mags, it can often feel that editors aren’t really into publishing your love poem. And they definitely want nothing to do with sex! Is that true? Am I making shit up? No! But also, maybe. Because my lived reality is that I’ve gone from feeling one way to seeing results change as I worked on my very love-y and sexy poems. 

I’m Shannan Mann, and I’m super excited to teach/instruct/guide your July Forever Workshop: “Hot and Heavy: Writing Love & Sex Poems that will Actually Get Published and Have Readers Begging for More”.

My qualifications are threefold, so strap on in. I’ve published a bunch of love poems. Some have won awards/honors. I’m the editor of ONLY POEMS where we love bringing sexy back in poetry today. I also just read a shit ton.

Now, a disclaimer: I can’t guarantee that you will 100% publish every single poem you fiddle with and create in this workshop. However, I can promise that you’ll have fun and leave with poems that are better than the ones you started with. 

Here’s a breakdown of what we’ll cover themed around the various stages of love, because why the hell not! 

Crushing Hard

• We’ll build our own personal canons of poets to read and reference 

First Love

• We’ll go back to the beginning and learn in a non-boring way about the history of love and sex in poetry and publishing

Blind Date

• We’ll learn to identify the elements that create a powerful love poem and how to move from the superficial to the truly substantive

Going Steady

• We’ll learn and practice exercises in focalization to develop drafts for 6 different types/forms of love poems

An Affair to Remember

• We’ll learn how to shadow-write based on our favorite poet’s work in order to maximize creativity and inspiration

Honeymoon Phase

• We’ll learn the “Machine” concept to build a personal poetic glossary so we can write a “perfect” poem each time

The Fun Divorce

• We’ll learn how to let go and prepare a piece for publication

After the Happily Ever After

• Recap + Next steps of developing a full-length project

This workshop will be four weeks long–starting July 1st. I will post two classes per week on Mondays and Wednesdays. I can’t wait to dive in with all of you. See you there!

Subscribe to receive Shannan’s classes as she posts them

If you’re new here, The Forever Workshop is a project designed to make writing education affordable for everyone.

Each month, a different instructor takes over this account to release a self-paced writing workshop in their area of expertise. 1/2 of their classes are free to all subscribers, and their full curriculum is available to paid subscribers.