North Haven, Maine, circa 1930, Beatrice Whitney Van Ness (1888-1981)
“Poems of place contain the psychological and geographic maps we make of the worlds we know, think we know, and those we remember.”
Join the Farnsworth Art Museum live online for a generative poetry workshop and craft talk with poet Melissa McKinstry. She’ll explore poetry inspired by the current exhibit Capturing Her Environment: Women Artists, 1870-1930. The session will begin with an introduction to some of the featured art and artists, led by Francesca Soriano, Associate Curator of American Art.
A selection of poems will be read by women whose life and work coincides with these women painters and then a selection of poems by contemporary women poets in Maine, whose work “captures their environment.”
Participants will have the opportunity to explore how place is evoked through craft elements like detail, image, and form. There will be time for writing, with an option to share what you create.
Melissa McKinstry holds an MFA from Pacific University. Her poetry appears in Adroit, Beloit, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets 2023, among other places. In 2024, she was selected as second place for The Maine Review Environs Prize, finalist for the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and finalist for the Ninth Letter Literary Awards, a Djanikian Scholar in Poetry at Adroit, and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Millay House Rockland.