WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE
March 12 – 26, 2021
Steph Sorensen
Steph Sorensen (she/her) is a feminist writer mom. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007. She has participated in several invited readings of her poetry, at the Prague International Writers Festival, the Connecticut Poetry Festival, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival Night of Fresh Voices, and others. She was awarded a scholarship to attend the Writing the Unreal retreat at the Highlights Foundation where she worked on revising a young adult novel manuscript. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Mississippi Review, Matchbook and 3Elements Review. She lives with her family in Pittsburgh, PA.
Steph splits her time between parenting her very energetic six-year-old, writing novels for young adults, and writing poetry and short stories for grownups. She is currently at work on a collection of short form writing consisting of poetry, prose poems and flash fiction, as well as work that blurs the boundaries between those genres. This collection will explore themes of motherhood, womanhood, identity and erasure. She enjoys employing aspects of speculative writing and magical realism as metaphor, and experimenting with form and structure. She is incredibly grateful to have been granted this residency for its generous two weeks of solitude and unbroken focus on writing, and intends to use this time to continue drafting and revision for this intra-genre short forms collection.
Community Event
Online Flash Fiction Workshop with the Petoskey District Library.
Petoskey to Hold Virtual Writing Workshop – News 9&10
Post Residency Feedback
Good Hart, March
Every stone is beautiful in the golden hour
eyes peeled hands in pockets mouth masked
it’s gusty and the waves are filled to their crests with light
roaring louder than beneath our dripping overpass
the ice lies in striated floes tips out
over the incoming tide in shelves and humps
larger swells frothing over rounded holes
to drag foaming fingertips
no piece of shore without a border wall of ice nowhere for the current
shoreline long as the orange-coned idle of cars coiling slow
toward the first round of shots or the second pulled north like us like the moon
pulls the undertow beneath the darkness of the water’s skirts pushes
the lake back onto its rocky shore cold wind whipping
under shadow of dunes blown stories-high fenced by leaning pines
yes screaming that it is here whether its owners are or not whether it is owned or not whether
clumped around sprawling empty summer homes and private property signs beach screaming
it is sunset or not but it is and everything has gone pink
slight upshore slope bearded with scrubs roots dried grass yellow and tan sand too cold to touch stones bigger stones snowbank slush mounds piled high like melting boundaries plowed outside some elsewhere shut-down mall waves cresting overtop sometimes or lapping underneath at stalactite icicles growing splitting growing from cantilevered peaks churning grey water rounded chunks floating and bashing together miniature glaciers the crack! of an ice spine collapsing small boulders filled with holes waves ceaselessly charging count them one two three four nine twenty-seven Lake Michigan the meniscus horizon haze scattered cirrus the sun—
Good Hart Artist Residency 