🥀 FEVER FRUIT: Writing the Heady, Holy, & Heavy Poetics of Summer 🥀

Wednesdays | July 16, 23, 30 & August 6, 2025 | 7pm-8:30PM EST | on Zoom | $100 for all 4 sessions

Oh, summer! What a fever dream. In this four-week generative poetry workshop, we’ll explore the lush, ephemeral, intoxicating landscape of high summer heat spells: the languor, the lust, the sorrow. From sea dreams to long shadows, we’ll read and write our way through summer's gorgeous grip.

🥀 You can expect:

• Weekly close readings of poems and excerpts of prose that capture the fever and fullness of summer

• Guided visualizations to deepen the sensory and emotional experience

• Dedicated time to write

• Word association practices

• A final, summery, exquisite corpse we’ll create together

• Weekly prompts inspired by place, folklore, nature, and astrology + a moody summer playlist for writing inspiration

• A group space for chatting, sharing, and creative inspiration

What inspired this workshop? I’ve always been obsessed with the mood of summer— its ripe, dripping fruits, its drunken lethargy, its expansive hope. But I’m also intrigued by the deep sense of melancholia and madness that summer brings. It’s sweaty. It’s claustrophobic. It’s intense. It’s heady. I find holiness in the heat. I am more prolific during the summer (Saint Of was born in June), and I find myself collecting swoon-worthy summer poems. So, I wanted to create a container that lets us indulge in something beautiful and big and wild, because July is a threshold season, right between the light and coming darkness. Honestly, summer is sort of goth. Let’s explore all of its layers together.

🥀 What you need
Come with your longing, your lemonade, & your writing devices. Have the ability to use Zoom.

🥀 About me
Lisa Marie Basile is an author, poet, and journalist based in Jersey City, NJ and NYC. She holds an MFA in writing from The New School.

She is the author of a few books of poetry, including SAINT OF (White Stag Publishing, 2025), Nympholespy (Inside the Castle, 2019, finalist in the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards), Apocryphal (Noctuary Press, 2014), and Andalucia (The Poetry Society of New York, 2012). She’s also written non-fiction, including Light Magic for Dark Times. She is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine.

Her essays, interviews, poetry, and other works can be found in The New York Times, Catapult, Narratively, Tinderbox Poetry, Lover’s Eye Press, Sporklet (edited by Richard Siken), Best Small Fictions (selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler), and Best American Experimental Writing 2020 (selected by Carmen Maria Machado and Joyelle McSweeney).

Lisa Marie has also led workshops or spoken at Manhattanville College, Columbia University, Emerson College, Pace University, The Moon Studio, The Author’s Guild, Stanza Books, Astrolushes, Radici Siciliane writing immersion, Brooklyn Brainery, The Poetry Society of New York, and more.

CREATIVE CREDITS: Eve (1896) by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer + Gregory Orr + Kate Baer + Lisa Marie Basile