Sometimes, the relationships and stories we most need to write about will resist letting themselves be put into words. We start to write and fail, or we stare at a blank page—not because we have too little to say, but maybe because our hearts are too full and no words seem like they could be enough. Experimenting with formal constraints to our writing can provide a container that holds what needs to be said, so that it can pour itself onto the page.
In this workshop, we will explore form in poetry and prose to invite difficult relationships to the page. Beginning from a short discussion of a piece of their own work that helped them to write into family relationships, authors Chad Frame and Catharina Coenen will guide writers to experiment with form in prose and poetry to create space for needed words.
Join Chad and Catharina at H&H Books on Sunday, August 9 from 1-3 PM for this workshop. Registration is free and highly recommended, due to the size of our lower level. If attendance exceeds the available space, workshop registrants will be prioritized.
About the Authors & Instructors:
Chad Frame is the author of Little Black Book, nominated for the Lambda Literary Award, and Smoking Shelter, winner of the Moonstone Chapbook Contest. He is the Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program, a Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County, PA, a founding member of the No River Twice poetry/improv performance troupe, and the founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival. His work appears in Rattle, Strange Horizons, Pedestal, Barrelhouse, Rust+Moth, on iTunes from the Library of Congress, and is archived on the moon with The Lunar Codex. Chad has taught poetry and prose workshops at Rosemont College, Arcadia University, In the Company of Laureates, the Caesura Poetry Festival, the Philadelphia Writers' Conference, Main Line School Nights, the Arts & Cultural Council of Bucks County, and many more venues.
Catharina Coenen came to the United States from Germany as a Fulbright Scholar to attend graduate school. She teaches biology and writing at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. Her essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, The Christian Science Monitor, Best of the Net, and other literary magazines. Catharina is the recipient of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Flash Nonfiction Prize awarded by The Forge, the Appalachian Review’s Denny Plattner Creative Nonfiction Prize, a Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science-as-Story Fellowship, and Residencies at Hedgebrook and at Millay Arts. Her essay collection, Unexploded Ordnance, is a 2026 Foreword Indies Winner and long-listed for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. It explores how the experiences of her mother, grandmother, and aunt during the bombings of World War II in Germany shaped her life and reverberate in the present.
