Workshop: Facing INTRUSIONS with CAConrad

Join MOCA Tucson & the University of Arizona Poetry Center for two free public workshops with poet and MOCA exhibiting artist CAConrad. Focused on unblocking and resourcing our creativity, Conrad returns just before their exhibition closes and during Tucson’s Gem and Mineral Show to offer their unique (Soma)tic Rituals as tools for freeing creative expression. 

Conrad’s (Soma)tic Rituals help us see the creative viability in everything around us––the poet has created writing rituals using the night sky to design constellations, to dream with crows, to talk with trees and ghosts, to translate Shakespeare’s sonnets with crystals, and to cope with the destroyed wilderness of our planet.

In this special pair of workshops Facing INTRUSIONS on Thursday, February 6 at 6pm and CRYSTAL CONJUNCTION on Saturday, February 8 at 3pm, the (Soma)tic rituals will help address the inner critic, unblocking artists from the negative energies that slow and stop creative practice; and the rituals will help counteract and engage the energies of the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, happening concurrently. 

 

About the workshop:

Longevity of Practice with (Soma)tic Rituals: Facing INTRUSIONS

2025 will be CA’s 50th anniversary of writing and publishing poetry, and over the past half-century, they have known many brilliant artists who stopped doing their work for various reasons, from being overwhelmed by their new and growing families or jobs to disappointments with the reception of their art. Using (Soma)tic Rituals can keep us vibrating on the frequency of our talents no matter what challenges lie ahead.

In this workshop, we will focus on Intrusions, which vary from holding onto negative comments about our art to doubts that hinder moving forward with the things we want to create. These voices often come forward in times of crisis and shut many artists down. (Soma)tic Rituals can be used to remain focused, always treating our creativity like a vital organ.

 

Register here.

 

About CA:

Former US-Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in The New York Times, “CAConrad’s poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious.”

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages, and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88

 

This workshop is presented in partnership with the University of Arizona Poetry Center.