Holly Wren Spaulding
author, teaching artist & founder of Poetry Forge
Over the past 25 years, I have worked with writers, artists, and activists in a range of educational settings including the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American Art in Detroit, an alternative high school in Ann Arbor, Northwestern Michigan College, and the Interlochen Center for the Arts, where I remain a member of the creative writing faculty. In 2010 I began teaching an evolving roster of writing workshops and retreats, first as Poetry Boot Camp and now as Poetry Forge, which is primarily an online school for poets and secret poets.
“This is imagination school, where we remember and recommit to the mysterious and essential part within each of us that sustains us, guides us, and gives way to art. What we are doing is paying attention. Slowing down enough to be present in our lives. Not only writing but living the poems.”
lifelong love
I was raised by artist-activists whose worldview was shaped by the late sixties and the art and resistance of that time. From the time I was a babe in arms, they took me to anti-war and peace marches, and my early education involved what we now tend to call "unschooling." Those formative years on an off-the-grid Homestead in northern Michigan as part of an experimental, intentional community, where the goal was to explore ways to live outside of mainstream society, and largely independent of the capitalist economy. This was a political project and an art project that explicitly rejected prevailing ideologies such as capitalism, militarism, and consumerism. The values of self-sufficiency, creativity, and resistance were nurtured in everyday life. I knew from a young age that I wanted to be an artist of some kind but I was probably already a protester, given my DNA. I was surrounded by plants, water, books, music, woodworking, craftspeople, and the encouragement to be and think creatively. This was as much about resourcefulness and creating my own amusement, as it was about cultivating some kind of skill. I was also introduced to political organizing and community building while still very young. This instilled an urge in me to initiate spaces and situations that would not otherwise exist, though I felt they were necessary for my social and political well being. Over the years, I’ve helped to bring Critical Mass demonstrations to my small town; to start independent, activist media projects for print and radio; and I’ve served on the boards of a local currency initiative, as well as environmental, literary, and arts organizations. All of this informs my teaching and aesthetics.
diverse experience
In addition to studying creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy, University of Michigan, and Trinity College, Ireland, where I received my Master of Philosophy degree in Creative Writing and Book Publishing in 2000, my teaching is shaped by my research and practical experience in the areas of visual art, dance, literary criticism, documentary filmmaking, floristry, and Zen Buddhism. Other important influences include many years of working on an organic farm; independent media production; editorial roles at numerous literary publications and presses; Feminist Business School; Herbal Mystery School; and community organizing and advocacy on behalf of the Great Lakes water commons through a direct action organization, Sweetwater Alliance, which I co-founded with fellow activists to resist the privatization of our groundwater by Nestle Corporation. In the decade since Poetry Forge was founded, I’ve worked with hundreds of writers to deepen their writing practice, place their work in literary journals, apply to graduate programs, complete poetry collections, edit essays and creative non-fiction, and nurture some of those folks to become educators themselves.
it’s all connected
Bringing the values of attention, slowness, contemplation, and beauty to wider audiences remains the heart of this work. Along the way, I continue to ask myself and my students: How can the practice of poetry lead to freer, happier, healthier citizens? How can this work—our work—support the collective?
publishing & awards
I am the author of Between Us (2022), Familiars (2020), If August (2017), and Pilgrim (2014), all published by Alice Greene & Co. Fleda Brown selected The Grass Impossibly for the Michigan Cooperative Press Chapbook Prize in Poetry in 2008. St. Brigid Press put out a special edition of my chapbook Fire in 2021. This project, involving a handset letterpress cover and handmade paper, brings together my interests in the visual and tactile aspects of the book arts, with a piece of writing that emerged from my involvement with the Beargrass Writers Retreat in Montana.
Other poems, articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Witness, The Ecologist, The New York Times, The Nation, and in the books The Poetry of Presence II (Grayson Books, 2023), The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace & Renewal (Storey Publishing, 2023), Elemental: Creative Nonfiction from Michigan (Wayne State University Press, 2019), We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism (Verso, 2003), and elsewhere. My essay, “In Defense of Darkness,” was included in the college writing textbook Inventing Arguments: 4th Edition (Cengage Learning, 2015), edited by John Mauk.
I’ve been granted residencies at The Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The Hill House, The Jean Noble Parsons Center for the Study of Art & Science, Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts, and the Leelanau Cultural Center, where I was the 2017 Ann Hall Artist in Residence. My poems have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net award, and my poems and essays received five Avery Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan, as well as the CuChulainn to Kavanaugh Award for Poetry in Northern Ireland.