Out of the depths: writing prayer: a poetry workshop with Marie Howe

Come study poetry and prayer with Marie Howe in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina. 

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes: “Who, if I called out, would hear me among the angelic hierarchies?”

The father of the sick child in Mark 9:23-25 cries out to Jesus “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

The speaker in T.S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday” says “Teach us to care and not to care. Teach is to sit still.”

The poet Fanny Howe reminds us of a Muslim prayer that says, “Lord, increase my bewilderment.”

The poet Jane Mead writes, “Jesus, I am cruelly lonely, and I do not know what I have done.”

Why do we pray? To praise? To plead? To complain? To curse? To thank? To speak? To listen?
To whom do we speak? For what do we hope?

Poets often write prayers. Prayer is often private; poems are often shared.

In this workshop, guided by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marie Howe, we will read and write prayer poems. Each day we’ll read poems written by poets from the past as well as contemporary poets. Looking closely at the poems – at tone and diction and image, and line and syntax and rhythm, etc.  – we will broaden the possibilities for our own voices. We will practice radical receptivity. We take time to generate our own prayer poems each day and have the opportunity to share with each other.

How can we find words? They will find us. We will have a wonderful time.

This is a low-residency workshop with less formal programming than some. We hope that this will allow people either to weave the workshop into their daily life, or claim spacious afternoons for writing time.

The workshop will begin at 6:00pm with dinner on Monday, May 4, and end at noon on
Friday, May 8.

Workshop Schedule (subject to modification):

• Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 9:30am – 12:30pm
• Friday from 9:30 – 12:00 noon
• Some evenings will have programming

There is no workshop registration fee for accepted participants, and some meals will be provided throughout the week. Please note that lodging is not provided and is the responsibility of participants. Accepted participants will receive a $500 fellowship to defray the costs of childcare, lodging, meals not provided, transportation, etc.

Marie Howe is the author of five volumes of poetry, New and Selected Poems, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Magdalene: Poems; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time; The Good Thief; and What the Living Do, and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship, and from 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State. In 2025, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

We are no longer accepting applications for this workshop as the deadline has passed.