Controlled Chaos: Writing to Abstract Art

Workshop Description

Using the Amherst Writers & Artists method, we'll write in response to the work of abstract artists like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky and other postwar painters. Each week participants will be presented with ten or more images and then write in-depth within timed intervals to two of them. No experience or knowledge of art history necessary.

Workshop Details

Summer 2026
Dates: June 9, 16, 23, 30
Four sessions with Barbara Krasner on Zoom
Tuesdays from 3:00 to 5:00 P.M. (ET)
$215

Register for Controlled Chaos: Writing to Abstract Art

Workshop Facilitator

Barbara Krasner has been a certified AWA workshop facilitator since 2013. Her literary work has appeared in more than seventy literary journals. Her love of ekphrastic writing has helped through a period of chronic illness and has resulted in many literary works, including poetry published or forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, Main Street Rag, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, The Jewish Writing Project, and elsewhere. Her ekphrastic poetry collections include Poems of the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press, 2025), The Night Watch: Poems (Kelsay Books, 2025), Insomnia: Poems after Lee Krasner (Dancing Girl Press, 2026) and the forthcoming The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026). She is the author of several fabulist short stories and is at work on a poetry collection in response to artwork by female surrealists.

Questions: editors@riverheronreview.com

Refunds: Up to one week prior to the workshop start date, full refund minus $15 processing fee. After that time, there are no refunds.

Workshop sessions are not recorded, nor are there make up sessions.