Catching Quetzalcoatl: Overcoming Writer's Block: a Poet Laureate Workshop Series

Catching Quetzalcoatl: Overcoming Writer's Block
a Poet Laureate Workshop Series
by Edward Vidaurre the 2018 City of McAllen Poet Laureate

Why Quetzalcoatl? The Aztec god of wind and wisdom supports learning, priestly study, writing, and books. His form and imagery embody what it is to be a poet, from his feathers to his wind breastplate.

Using his image and story as a focus, we will show examples of how to turn anything that grabs your attention into an opportunity to write! 

This workshop will be generative. You’ll walk out of here with several drafts of poems that you can then refine.

Info:

What: Catching Quetzalcoatl: Overcoming Writer's Block (a Poet Laureate Workshop Series)
Who: Edward Vidaurre, City of McAllen Poet Laureate 2018
When: Saturday, June 9, 2018 10am to 12:30pm
Where: McAllen, TX TBD
Cost: $20.00

One workshopista will take home David Bowles' new collection:

Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky: Myths of Mexico Lindo

The stories in Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky trace the history of the world from its beginnings in the dreams of the dual god, Ometeotl, to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico and the fall of the great city Tenochtitlan. In the course of that history we learn about the Creator Twins―Feathered Serpent and Dark Heart of Sky―and how they built the world on a leviathan's back; of the shape-shifting nahualli; and the aluxes, elfish beings known to help out the occasional wanderer. And finally, we read Aztec tales about the arrival of the blonde strangers from across the sea, the strangers who seek to upend the rule of Motecuhzoma and destroy the very stories we are reading.
David Bowles stitches together the fragmented mythology of pre-Colombian Mexico into an exciting, unified narrative in the tradition of William Buck's Ramayana, Robert Fagles's Iliad, and Neil Gaiman's Norse Myths. Readers of Norse and Greek mythologies will delight in this rich retelling of stories less explored.