Meet Your Workshop Lead
Maggie Dillow
Summer 2025 Tiny Resident
Maggie Dillow grew up writing an embarrassingly prolific amount of terrible teen poetry in Chicagoland, primarily inspired by the private perils of suburban girlhood. She is the founding member of the Post-apocalyptic Poets for a Pre-apocalyptic World, a collective dedicated to community care, elevating the work of emerging artists, and performance-based poetics. She is also the co-host of Girlhood Movie Database, a podcast deconstructing depictions of girlhood in film. Some of her words can be found in The /temz/ Review, Hot Pink Magazine, Blue Earth Review, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and is the 2024 recipient of the Anne Spencer Memorial Award through The Poetry Society of Virginia. When she’s not writing, teaching, or performing, you can find her in the woods.
Substack: Epistles from an American Poet
Instagram: @saint_margaret, @postapocalyptic_poets, @girlhoodmoviedatabase
Website: maggiedillow.com
The Workshop
In this workshop, we will be writing post-apocalyptic poems for a pre-apocalyptic world.
Participants will be encouraged to write from the future for the future, guided by the varying
axiom that a better world must be imagined before it can be built. The abstract goal of this
workshop is to inspire participants to create what is most urgent to their imaginations. The
concrete goal of this workshop is to help writers continue or begin creative practices that lead us
most urgently towards our shared liberations, community-building beyond the workshop space,
and an anthologized zine.
Day one of the workshop will include a survey of ritualistic writing-based mourning practices, in
particular the Victorian era tradition of “mourning stationery” in which the bereaved conveyed
their loss by sending letters outlined in black borders. Participants will write their own mourning
papers, with a focus on the futures they may feel are no longer possible, and in doing so, giving
those futures a present.
Day two will turn us towards liberation practices via a survey of poetics that elicits the three
tenets of better-world-building: community care, grit, and joy. This phase of the workshop will
focus on the inherent value of writing poetry; language situated beyond the world’s prescription
of it is by its nature the very belief in the possibility of a different kind of world. Participants will
write towards the question: What would you say to the world as a poet from the future (to the
world before the future) in which the most valuable currency is poetry?
WHEN & WHERE
Saturday & Sunday August 23 & 24 : 10 AM-12 PM PST / 11 AM-1 PM MST / 12-2 PM CST / 1-3 PM EST
The workshop will take place virtually via Zoom. Upon registration, you will be sent the link closer to the event.
REGISTRATION
Registration for this workshop is now closed. Please join us for our next workshop or check out our monthly asynchronous workshops on Patreon!
To bring poetry to the people, we are offering our workshops on a donation basis.
To support our Tiny Resident, we recommend a $25-50 sliding donation.
That said, please feel welcome to pay any amount that you can!
All funds will be used to support Tiny Spoon’s Tiny Residency Program.