On Fascination
(a makeshop for poets and nonfiction writers)
How to describe “fascination?” Maybe it’s the inexplicable draw of another being, object, idea, place, or memory that exerts a powerful hold, and keeps on being thrilling and alive – and sometimes very weird. It’s …something… that seeks and holds our attention, and, I believe, has much to teach us. In this generative makeshop we’ll read writers who give over to their fascinations and who locate a patient/joyful/intense form of attention for the other, who stay with the unknown until habits, properties, and mysteries are discovered.
We’ll be exploring how to be in relationship with (not report on, mimic, or exoticize) whatever it is we find fascinating, and how to invite that response into our days (destabilized as they are at the moment).
This makeshop is for poets and nonfiction writers looking to make new work or find ways of deepening an ongoing fascination. While this is a generative session, we’ll also reflect and discuss each others’ new work in immediate and open ways. A friend recently wrote to me about the uncertainty of starting a new book, “well, if I approach it like a traveler with a yearning, maybe I’ll be ok.” I think this is a perfect description of how to follow one’s fascination.
Lia Purpura’s Makeshop
Sunday, September 21, 2025:
10:00 AM-4:00 PM
$200. Limited seating!
(Includes lunch)
Click here for makeshop tickets!
Lia Purpura
Lia Purpura is the author of ten collections, including essays, poems, translations and artists’ books. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Looking (essays), her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as five Pushcart Prizes, the AWP Award and others. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, Emergence, and elsewhere. Purpura has served as Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Loyola University; other teaching venues include the Rainier Writing Workshop, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program, as well as workshops at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility, and the Glenwood Life Recovery Center. Her newest collections are It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (poems) and All the Fierce Tethers (essays).