About the Course
Writing Our Human Air: Creative Writing Workshops
Wednesdays, March 18, 25, April 1, 2026
11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. MDT
10:00 PDT / 11:00 MDT (includes SK) / 12:00 CDT / 1:00 EDT / 2:00 ADT
In her famous poem, Diving into the Wreck, Adrienne Rich talks about 'diving into the wreck' where 'words are purposes, where words are maps.' In these workshops, we will find the words, recover the memories, revive the stories by going into the place Rich calls 'our human air.'
Workshop 1 – Wednesday, March 18: Diving into the Wreck: Finding Memories, Turning Them Into Words. In this workshop, we will, as Adrienne Rich has described in her poem "Diving Into the Wreck" go into our memories to see and recover what was lost and buried.
Workshop 2 – Wednesday, March 25: The Habit of Seeing: A Poetry Workshop. In this workshop, we will look at and into Nature, specifically to write about it in different poetic short forms like the haiku.
Workshop 3 – Wednesday, April 1: Is there a story in that? Crafting Narratives. In this workshop, we'll look at ways of telling a story through scene writing.
Access to the recordings of these workshops will be sent to all who register.
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
Your Instructor
Sally Ito, B.F.A., M.A.
Sally Ito, B.F.A. (Creative Writing), M.A. (English) is a writer and translator who lives in Winnipeg, Treaty One Treaty, ancestral lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Dakota and Dene people and the homeland of the Métis Nation. She is a creative writing instructor at Canadian Mennonite University. Sally is the author of four books of poetry, Frogs in the Rain Barrel (1996), Season of Mercy (1999), Alert to Glory (2011), and Heart’s Hydrography (2022). She has also published a collection of short stories called Floating Shore in 1998 and is perhaps best known for her 2018 memoir The Emperor’s Orphans about the 4,000 Japanese Canadians who were repatriated to Japan during World War II. You can learn more about Sally by visiting these websites: https://www.cmu.ca/about/faculty/574 and https://writersunion.ca/member/sally-ito