CARRABASSETT VALLEY — The first in a series of Sugarloaf Creative Discovery Workshops will be a creative writing workshop, The Power of the Sentence, led by UMF professor Jeffrey Thomson on Saturday, Feb. 7, at the Sugarloaf Outdoor Center.

The workshop, held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., will offer a craft talk, writing assignment and critique. Participants will have the opportunity to get outdoors to cross-country ski, snowshoe or walk, as well as have time to write.

The workshop includes lunch, an individual conference with Jeffrey Thomson, culminating with a reading by him and reception.

The cost is $85 (includes rental equipment; arrive by 9:30 a.m. for fitting.). For more information and registration, contact Mary Poulin at 462-2315 or basspoulin@gmail.com.

The Power of the Sentence workshop looks at the sentence, along with the line, and how that defines a poem’s pace and passion. It creates movement and defines the boundaries of the ideas that the language itself evokes. This workshop will begin by thinking about what sentences are and how they work in poems, and then ask you to write your own poems in response.

Thomson is the author of four books of poems, including Birdwatching in Wartime, winner of both the 2010 Maine Book Award and the 2011 ASLE Award in Environmental Creative Writing.

He has three books forthcoming in the next three years: a memoir, Fragile; his translations of The Complete Poems of Catullus; and a new collection of poems, The Belfast Notebooks.

In 2012 he was the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and in 2015 he will be the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University and the C.V. Starr Center at Washington College. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.

Additional workshops in photography, videography and painting are upcoming.

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