Saturday, September 13 from 10am-4pm
There will be an hour lunch break mid-way through the workshop (lunch is not provided).
Early bird $65 | Register by 8/30 (discount applied at checkout)
Regular Price $80 | Effective 9/1
Space is LIMITED to ensure an intimate experience. We recommend signing up early!
Refund and other policies can be found here.
Writing prose or a poem is a labor of love, demanding countless hours of work. But once it’s on the page, writers often face the even greater challenge of sharing their work. When it comes to reading aloud, how do you make your words come alive for an audience? How do you pluck the text off the page and into the hearts of those who listen?
In this hands-on workshop, Bruce Spang will guide a small group of writers in how to prepare your written work—be it a story, poem or non-fiction piece—in its journey from the page to the stage. He’ll teach you how to prepare your text with visual cues that prompt you to pause, shift pace, adjust tone, emphasize key phrases, and explore the emotional arc of your piece—ensuring that your words capture the attention and emotions of your listeners.
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The session will be divided into two parts:
The first section will be learning how to prep the text with cues about pacing of each part, to use the instrument of the voice, to develop confidence in using the wide range of vocal pitches that can express a wide range of emotions, to incorporate both facial and bodily gestures to incarnate emotionally what is happening in the text, and to engage the audience with eye contact.
In the second section, Bruce will coach each poet individually in how to make their writing, word by word, line by line, come alive. He will prompt each writer to use some of the techniques that were presented in the first section. By the end of the session, each writer will have rehearsed and performed their piece so that it does come alive for the audience. -
Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, is the author of two novels, The River Crossed (2024), The Deception of the Thrush and a memoir Those Close Beside Me: A Young Man’s Search for Home. He has published five books of poems, including Twist (2025), All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey, To the Promised Land Grocery and Boy at the Screen Door (Moon Pie Press) along with several anthologies and several chapbooks. He is the poetry editor of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine and staff writer for The Asheville Poetry Review. His poems have been published in Connecticut River Review, Puckerbrush Review, Red Rover Magazine, Great Smokies Review, Kalopsia Literary Journal, Café Review and other journals across the United States. He teaches courses in fiction and poetry at Great Smokies Writing Program at University of North Carolina in Asheville and lives in Candler, NC with his husband Myles Rightmire and their two dogs, fifteen fish, and eighteen birds.
More at : brucepspang.wordpress.com