How to Carry a Bead of Acid: Finding Forms for Wonders and Wounds

In one of her poems, Natasha Trethewey calls the heart a “reliquary,” which is a container for storing sacred relics. In this supportive, generative poetry workshop, we’ll read several contemporary poems that hold joyful, painful, and even sacred experiences with tenderness and urgency. For us, these poems will become both prompts and guides that teach us how we might structure our own memories and wonders. This workshop is open to writers and poets at any level. All you need is a little curiosity and a love of words.

MEET THE INSTRUCTOR

Scott Frey is a poet and educator who grew up in Western Pennsylvania and teaches English at Pine Meadow Academy in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. He and his wife, Meryl, run a non-profit charity, The Charlotte Frey Foundation, whose mission is to help children with multiple handicaps and life-threatening illnesses and their families improve their quality of life. His book, Heavy Metal Nursing, won the Tampa Review Prize for poetry. Among other places, his work has been published or is forthcoming in Passages North, december magazine, The Adroit Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, New York Quarterly, and The Missouri Review, where he was awarded the Perkoff Prize for poetry. His hybrid chapbook, Strange Vigil, won the Black River Chapbook competition hosted by Black Lawrence Press, and debuted in September, 2025. He and his family live in Granby, Connecticut. Visit him online at scottfrey.org 

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