Remaining Between Knowing and Not-Knowing: A Writing Lab with Elizabeth Bradfield

$50.00

Uncertainty is uncomfortable, a space we often skip over, stepping on the next stone in a river crossing to stand on the next known thing. Uncertainty is a cop-out, an avoidance of looking honestly at a difficult truth, particularly when that truth holds our own culpability. But the movement between assertion and perplexity, between clarity and confusion, can also provide a powerful nexus in poems. In this generative workshop guided by Elizabeth Bradfield, we’ll discuss the ethics of choosing to stay in “not-knowing,” considering when it is a fruitful space and when it is avoidant; we will also consider what certainty masks and oversimplifies. We will read and discuss poems that hold crystalline points of truth alongside foggy drifts of fumble; we’ll write and map corners of our own terra incognita.

Wednesday, December 16, 2026
12:00-1:30 PM Central Time
Live online

Uncertainty is uncomfortable, a space we often skip over, stepping on the next stone in a river crossing to stand on the next known thing. Uncertainty is a cop-out, an avoidance of looking honestly at a difficult truth, particularly when that truth holds our own culpability. But the movement between assertion and perplexity, between clarity and confusion, can also provide a powerful nexus in poems. In this generative workshop guided by Elizabeth Bradfield, we’ll discuss the ethics of choosing to stay in “not-knowing,” considering when it is a fruitful space and when it is avoidant; we will also consider what certainty masks and oversimplifies. We will read and discuss poems that hold crystalline points of truth alongside foggy drifts of fumble; we’ll write and map corners of our own terra incognita.

Wednesday, December 16, 2026
12:00-1:30 PM Central Time
Live online

This is a live, participatory lab and it will not be recorded. A meeting link will be emailed a few days prior to the lab. Cancellations must be made 48 hours prior to the lab and will be charged a $10 cancellation fee. We offer partial scholarships for our labs. Apply here by November 1.

Elizabeth Bradfield’s seven books include SOFAR: Poems, which includes poems published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Sun, and Orion; Interpretive Work, which won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry; Toward Antarctica: An Exploration; and the co-created Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award. Editor-in-chief of Broadsided and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Liz teaches creative writing at Brandeis University, directs the Poetry Concentration for Western Colorado University’s MFA program, and works as a naturalist and field assistant at home on Cape Cod.