Susie Anderson
Staff Writer
In the Chautauqua Writers’ Center workshops for Week One, participants will use their voices to guide their poetry and use their imagination to generate speculative stories.
Deanna Nikaido and Sally Wen Mao will kick off the 2025 Writers’ Center Workshop series. Throughout the season, the Chautauqua Writers’ Center will welcome a breadth of faculty members, from poets, novelists and children’s authors to screenwriters, songwriters and voice actors who will lead workshops and share their work with the Chautauqua community.
Nikaido will serve as the poetry faculty and Mao as the prose faculty for Week One.
Nikaido’s workshop is called “Giving Voice to the Poem Inside” and Mao’s is titled “Invoking Speculation and Folklore in Writing,” both available through Special Studies. Nikaido and Mao will read from their work at 3:30 p.m. Sunday in the Hall of Philosophy.
Nikaido is the author of two poetry collections, Voices Like Water and Vibrating with Silence. Formerly a coordinator for the national recitation program Poetry-Out-Loud, Nikaido focuses on the importance of voice as a vehicle for meaning in poetry.
“Poetry is an experience,” Nikaido said. “You don’t want the poem to stop at the ears — you want it to land inside the people that you are speaking to or the people who are reading your poetry.”
Throughout the workshop, Nikaido will work with students to answer the question, “How do you get your poems to live inside another person?”
Recitation, Nikaido said, allows poets to add depth to their work beyond the words on a page, as “literal meaning is only one part of total meaning.”
By reading, writing and reciting poetry in the workshop, Nikaido encourages students to breathe purpose and intention into their work.
“I hope that people will walk away with the ability to listen differently,” Nikaido said, “to get out of their heads … about how they’re going to write as opposed to feeling and be confident that they could speak it into the world as well.”
On Sunday, Nikaido will read from her published and unreleased work related to the Week One theme: “Transformation: The Forces Shaping Our Tomorrow.” Nikaido is joined by Mao, who will trace her transformation as a writer over the past decade by reading from earlier work and her most recent fiction collection.
Initially inspired by a childhood memory, Mao fell into a research rabbit hole of a centuries-old Chinese folktale and began writing. The result was her 2024 fiction collection, Ninetails, a series of stories that intertwine an ancient trope with modern feminist themes.
In addition to Ninetails, Mao is the author of three poetry collections and the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She taught a speculative poetry workshop through Chautauqua Writers’ Center’s virtual programming in 2021 and will return to Chautauqua in-person to teach her first ever fiction workshop.
Bringing in examples from writers such as Angela Carter, Helen Oyei and Karen Russell, Mao anticipates a workshop in which students dive into existing stories and emerge with new inspiration. By examining mythologies, folktales and science, Mao will encourage students to “extract the meanings to apply them to our present day realities.”
To strike a balance between experience, research and imagination, Mao encourages students to focus on a detail — a single thread — from a work that interests them and weave it into a greater story.
Mao said there is a “false binary between writing what you know versus writing imaginatively.” In her workshop, she will teach students to blend these two ideas and “work on something that takes risks.”
