'Journey to Happiness' author Suzan E. Zan will give workshop at Hearth & Soul
Award-winning author Suzan E. Zan is conducting a free poetry workshop at Hearth and Soul in Tallahassee on Saturday, Jan. 29.
Zan will use examples from her poetry collection, "From Suffering to Salve: My Journey to Happiness" (Turtle Cove Press, 2021) to guide participants through writing poetry that expresses their emotions. A read of Zan’s poetry convinces us she has something to teach us.
Like William Wordsworth, the founder of English Romanticism, Zan finds spiritual communion with nature and uses the common language of ordinary people — what she calls “sass” or “snark” — to express her journey and explore her emotions.
“I am the ocean that blankets the earth… the night that cradles the sky,” she writes in “It’s Elemental.” Another poem, “Clouds are the Dreamscape of Creativity,” rings true of her desire for pensive solitude and creativity despite being misunderstood as a child. It echoes Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”
Zan is adept with extended metaphor, lyrical elegy or welcoming the births of children. She delivers emotional uplift when she is claimed by a 48-years lost half-sister and father, and let down when she is unable to reach her birth mother.
From narrative poetry full of clever images and enriching metaphor to lyrics set to strains of pop music, her ease with verse and voice, sound and sense makes us grateful she is offering a poetry writing workshop.
If you go
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: 'Journey to Happiness' author Suzan E. Zan will give workshop
