Introducing Holy Gossip
Cate and Colin want to get into poems with you.
Hey y’all,
Holy Gossip is the brainchild of poets Colin Cheney and Cate Marvin. It’s about making a space for poems despite everything. It’s about tending to the soul of one’s practice with an eye toward sustaining consistency and integrity through the lifetime of one’s work. It’s about setting aside the anxiety of publication. It’s about making work that bucks contemporary conventions.
That sounds pretty heavy, doesn’t it? But isn’t that really what poets are all about? There is nothing not serious about undertaking poetry as a vocation. We hope to create a space–here and IRL– that sustains the distinct vision and ingenuity of individual poets, so that said writers are better positioned to produce meaningful work in a world increasingly hostile to creative expression.
Holy Gossip began as a weekend poetry intensive at Cate’s house in Maine (we both live in coastal Maine). We wanted to create a workshop to help folx interrogate their work and reassess its potential. We wanted to prepare other poets to create work that surprises and maybe scares them a little, work that takes them out of their comfort zone. We wanted to regard rhetorical forms that provide us with the choreographies that draw us into unexplored nuances of expression.
We rooted our Holy Gossip work in the contradictory. We wanted to both relax and get a lot done at the same time. We wanted to heal while facing our demons. We wanted to escape the hideousness of our 21st century American experience while creating work that combats uprising fascism. We wanted to spend time alone, but we also want to make new friends!
This summer of 2024, we’re running two more workshops in Maine–one in Scarborough, and one in Kingfield–because we had such great fun with the first one, and loved building this new community of poets (more about and from them in later posts). If you’re interested in these workshops, check out: www.holygossip.com . We’ve got a few spots in each workshop still open, but they are hotcakes, so get on it.
So: we’ve created this Substack newsletter as our way of expanding the communities of folx we can engage with. Each week we’ll post:
A poetry prompt from our archive of wicked awesome poetry prompts;
A reflection on a poet whose work and being in the world we’re just loving;
A craft essay on a poem we’re preoccupied with;
A poem by a guest contributor;
Something else that’s on our mind-grapes about things in this poetry/world.
Holy Gossip is meant to sustain, nourish, surprise, and re-engage all of our poet-selves that have been contending with this strange, hard world.
We hope you’ll subscribe, share, follow us on Instagram (@holygossippoetry) talk to us, share work, attend a workshop. We’re excited to get to know y’all.
Love,
Colin & Cate
(he/him; she/her)
