The Word Barn serves as a home and cultivation point for a variety of arts and community gatherings.
Below are a few of the current offerings you can find in this space.
An Easter Family Story Hour
Raynes Farm & Barn, 61 Newfields Road, Exeter, NH
Saturday, April 13, 1-3pm
Come join us for a fun-filled family gathering – featuring a story hour with local readers each reading their favorite Easter/Spring stories, baby chicks, local rotisserie chicken sandwiches from neighboring Vernon Family Farm, and a giant Easter Egg Hunt!
All ages welcome – come join in the fun.
This event is in support of the Raynes Farm Conservation Land.
$7 per person/ $22 per family.
A Prose Poem Workshop with Shira Dentz
March 9 & 10
In this two-day workshop, we’ll explore the elusive form of the prose poem through reading, discussion, writing experiments, and workshop.
We’ll read and discuss prose poems by poets including Francis Ponge, Rosmarie Waldrop, Claudia Rankine, and Charles Simic, and unconventional writing prompts will follow each of our discussions. Each hour we’ll enter a different portal to this liminal space, shifting our starting point from objects to metaphysics to social autobiography to the surreal.
The question, “What is a prose poem?,” has been notoriously difficult to answer, and we will embark on an open-ended journey. Since form can be viewed in relation to its content, the prose poem is perhaps a most uncontained form (despite its formal regularity on the page). Together, we will plumb this textual and textural space, the nascent matter in your own generative imagination. As prelude to each day’s class, we will do warm-up sensory/language experiments to flex your bodily sense-perceptions, language, and imagination, and we will conclude on the second day with an extended workshop that will give everyone the chance to refine at least one prose poem they drafted through this workshop.
Shira Dentz is the author of four full-length books, black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), door of thin skins (CavanKerry), how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry), and the sun a blazing zero (forthcoming, Lavender Ink/Diálogos), and two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Shearsman), and FLOUNDERS (Essay Press). Her writing appears widely in journals including POETRY, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Brooklyn Rail, and Western Humanities Review, and featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, she has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah, and is currently Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky and teaches creative writing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Upstate New York.
SPACE IS LIMITED.
Fermentation Workshop
April 7
10am – Noon – SOLD OUT
Come ferment with us!
$30 per person
Reserve a Spot
Time to Write
1st & 3rd Thursdays, 7-9pm
An ongoing writing workshop led by co-owner of The Word Barn and host of The Silo Series, Sarah Anderson (and occasional guest writers).
Come exchange work with writers; give and receive feedback; use a writing prompt to get your creative juices flowing and more.
1st & 3rd Thursday of every month, The Word Barn
7-9 pm
Register here.
Ongoing Bi-Weekly Studio Painting Classes
Christopher Volpe
Evening oil painting group classes, suitable for beginners and adventurous painters alike.
Demos, instruction, refreshments, and fertile ground for skill-building and self expression.
All you need to bring is a basic painting kit (paints, brushes, mineral spirits, canvas and easel), your favorite bottle of wine (if so inclined), and your sense of adventure, as each week a new game plan is tried out for the painting du jour.
Christopher Volpe is an oil painter creating moody, poetic landscapes in an expressive, tonalist style. Though rooted in landscape, his atmospheric paintings combine the traditional and the contemporary to express intangible feelings and ideas. Largely self-taught, Volpe has quickly established himself as an artist with uncommon vision and truly evocative style.
Learn more about Christopher Volpe’s workshops, about Christopher Volpe, or visit his website.