The Enthusiasm of Influence

The Enthusiasm of Influence

Award-winning poet, Sandra Marchetti asks:

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We’ve all heard of the “anxiety” of influence. Have you ever struggled to pin down who or what is influencing your writing? Do you want to learn how to write with your influences instead of against them? Do you worry that acknowledging your influences makes your work less likely to be taken seriously? Do you want to find out more about what makes you, you on the page? If so, this workshop will help you to sleuth your voice.

You will learn how your influences are working in your writing, how to make an influence-driven exercise into a polished piece, and how and when to “steal” from writers you love.

Literary “influencers” like Jessica Rae Bergamino, Ansel Elkins, and Colm Tóibín will be discussed.

Bring two influential texts (art, poems, music!) to share, a pre-existing draft of your own that you want to revise, and some blank notebook paper! 

Irish Novelist Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop:

“Thus when I read Elizabeth Bishop’s final book, Geography III, poems that dealt with such care and precision with Nova Scotia, her place of loss, poems that dealt with the pull toward a place despite the lure of elsewhere, I saw something that I knew and felt. I read Geography III in 1978, the year after it came out, the year when I had returned to Ireland from Spain. I was twenty-three and had stopped writing poetry. I did not know then that Bishop’s poetics of north and south, home and elsewhere, would haunt me and nourish the work I would do in fiction. But I was interested in her tone, by the suggestions of loss, by her way of making what was unfamiliar seem even stranger, and during my first journey to Brazil in 1985, I had her on my mind and in my sights.” ~On Elizabeth Bishop 

Class FAQs

• Class will be held one Thursday, December 11th 6-7:30pm.
• RoL Member: $32 :: Nonmembers : $40
• What the course is worth: $120
• Email if you’re interested, and we’ll save your spot!

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Instructor Bio

Sandra Marchetti is the 2023 winner of The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, DIORAMA, from Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2025), Aisle 228 (SFA Press, 2023), and Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015). Sandy is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry and essays appear widely in Mid-American Review, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She is Poetry Editor Emerita at River Styx Magazine. Sandy earned an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from George Mason University and now serves as the Assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College in Chicagoland. 

You can find out more at: https://sandramarchetti.net/