The Free Gen: Iowa City’s Original Generative Workshop with Paula Cisewski

Co-sponsored by PorchLight and Iowa City Poetry, the Free Generative Writing Workshops provide a space for career writers, curious beginners, writers of all income levels and stages of life. Our goal is to make it easy to meet and learn from some of the most talented writer/teachers living in or passing through Iowa City. Every month a new writer leads a generative workshop, presenting a prompt inspired by their own preoccupations, passions, or interests. It has been an adventure, and we are continually inspired by the creative concentration of participants, and the powerful beginnings the workshop generates. The Free Generative Writing Workshops are offered in a hybrid format.

Image, insight, archetype. Your Tarot deck may provide guidance, but how can you also use the deck to generate or revise your poems? I will give a brief introduction of Tarot for newcomers and provide examples of a couple spreads. We’ll read and discuss a few famously Tarot-inspired poems, and I’ll describe the process I’ve been using the past couple years. After that, we’ll generate work using the cards. Please feel free to bring your own deck if you’ve got one! If not, that’s okay, too!

After the workshop stay to hear a reading from Paula’s new book, “The Becoming Game.”

After the frightening results of the 2016 election, Paula Cisewski adopted a new writing practice and coping mechanism. She would invite a friend over for tea and a tarot reading. Later she would share with them the first draft of a poem inspired by the cards, the conversation, and whatever of the world had leaked in. The practice made space for meaningful communication in an uncertain time.” Precise, furious, political, controversial, paradoxical, provocative, confessional, intimate, friendly, honest, metric, exuberant, crazy, subdued poetry,” Grzegorz Kwiatowski wrote in praise of The Becoming Game. “Everything here contradicts and collides because this poetry contains many voices, many styles, many stories, but they all belong to one author.”

Paula Cisewski is the author of six poetry collections, including her newest, The Becoming Game (Hanging Loose Press), a 2026 finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. Her other collections include Ceremonies for No Repair, Quitter (winner of the Diode Editions Book Prize), The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, selected by Franz Wright), and Upon Arrival, as well as several chapbooks.

Cisewski’s poems and prose have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Hanging Loose, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, Conduit, and Brevity. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and included in several anthologies. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Oberholtzer Foundation, and Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts. Her poems have been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, for Best Spiritual Poetry, and for Best of the Net.

Cisewski has taught writing privately and academically for more than two decades. She earned her BA from St. Catherine’s University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Minneapolis. She is also a co-editor of Beauty School Editions and maintains a visual art practice.