Workshops
Small-circle workshops in poem and short fiction. We read aloud, we listen to silence, and we treat every draft as a guest who has come a long way to be heard.
A literary practice from Marquette, Michigan
A room for the unhurried word
Russell Thorburn — five books of poems, an NEA Fellowship, and the Upper Peninsula’s first poet laureate — keeps a small workshop for poets and prose writers who would rather slow a sentence down than rush it along.
his eyes look away every time when the photographer tells him to count to three and not blink, but there’s a freighter on the Detroit River. Herons stalk the riverbank, like diplomats of a lost country, and he daydreams about his wife when she’s washing up in the morning. From “Henry Zender” · All That My Body Can Bear
Why Henry Zender
Henry Zender — tavern keeper on the Detroit River, three daughters and a son waiting for him on a Lutheran afternoon — was Russell’s great-grandfather. He survives in a single photograph and in the rooms of family memory. The name belongs to this practice because what we do here is what the photograph could not: look back without blinking, count to three, and let the freighter pass.
The work offered on these pages is built around four small disciplines — teaching, shaping, reading aloud, and writing by hand or on a manual typewriter. Each is a way of refusing the machine for long enough to find what the page wants to say.
Four offerings
Manuscript Shaping
One-on-one work on a poetry collection or a book of stories — sequencing, the arc of a trilogy, the placement of the quiet poems against the loud ones. Drawn from the shaping of three Cornerstone Press books.
Readings
Public and private readings from the Cornerstone trilogy and the forthcoming All That My Body Can Bear. Available for colleges, libraries, festivals, and small literary gatherings.
Unmechanized Writing
Sessions and correspondence devoted to writing by hand, by typewriter, by margin and by mail — the slow tools that let a poem keep its breath. A practice, not a nostalgia.
From the writing desk
Russell’s third Cornerstone Press collection, All That My Body Can Bear, completes a trilogy that began with Let It Be Told in a Single Breath and And the Heart Will Not Quicken. A book of fiction — Strange News from Another Hotel — is underway, drawn from his years as a desk clerk at the Old Marquette Inn in 1980, the winter John Lennon was killed.