What I appreciated most about our workshop with Melanie was her presence. I found her to be very inspiring because she wasn’t just teaching us how to better interpret poetry or how to write them. Instead, she showed us how a poem was meant to be read. Melanie broke down several pieces with us, helping us analyze the sub-context of every line – even if there weren’t that many of them like in William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” She spoke with such passion, and I really felt engaged in her workshop because of it. I love that she emphasized our participation as a class, calling on us individually even if we were too scared to speak up and share an opinion.

Melanie also had us work on developing our inner creativity. She worked with us to create a word cloud of two types of terms. The first was about themes we would like to explore. This included a variety of emotions we were feeling at the time and topics that we could individually relate to. I personally got a lot out of this exercise. I was really excited to write my own poems. The structured format Melanie presented us with as guidelines were very helpful because it is often difficult to start from scratch. I thought this was a wonderful in-class session as it allowed us to explore our creativity from the comfort of our classroom.