2-Part Workshop
Exploring the Feminine Divine Dayna Patterson
The Shekhinah. Lady Wisdom. God the Mother. Many religious traditions are patriarchal and worship mainly a male deity, but traditions of the feminine divine persist, sometimes hidden, obscured. In this two-part workshop, we’ll “dwell in possibility” as we explore alternative approaches to theology, uncovering and celebrating the feminine divine. We’ll look at prose and poetry by Alicia Ostriker, Allison Pelegrin, Elizabeth Vignali, Traci Brimhall, Vandana Khanna, and others, as we reconceptualize and draft our own poems, flash fiction, and micro-memoir pieces that question, invoke, praise, and complicate the feminine divine.
Because March is Women’s History Month, in the second workshop, we’ll continue our exploration of the feminine divine as we discuss 2022’s theme, designated by the National Women’s History Alliance: “Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope.” We’ll write to and about women whose contributions may have been overlooked, including our own maternal ancestors, recognizing and relishing the sacred as manifest in the women around us.
Dayna Patterson is a Thea-curious recovering Mormon, fungophile, macrophotography enthusiast, and textile artist. She’s the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Honors include the Association for Mormon Letters Poetry Award and the 2019 #DignityNotDetention Poetry Prize judged by Ilya Kaminsky. Her creative work has appeared recently in EcoTheo, Kenyon Review, and Whale Road Review. She’s the founding editor of Psaltery & Lyre and a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. In her spare time, she curates Poetry + Fungus, a pairing of poetry books and species from the fungal world. daynapatterson.com