The Power of Articles: How “A”, “An”, and “The” Can Shape Our Perceptions

An Online Workshop with CMarie Fuhrman
Tuesday, January 27
5:00 – 7:00pm Pacific Time
Registration: $60 or $55 for Fishtrappers

Is the registration fee an obstacle for you to attend this workshop? Fishtrap offers a limited number of scholarships to help with the cost. Contact Program Director Mike Midlo for more information. mike@fishtrap.org

What’s the difference between a crisis and the crisis? Or simply stating, “Crisis is here”? Everything. In our writing and speech, the smallest words—and their deliberate omission—do the heaviest lifting as powerful, nearly invisible tools of persuasion.

This nuts-and-bolts session investigates how ‘a,’ ‘an,’ ‘the,’ and/or their absence shape our world. We’ll move beyond grammar to see how this choice can include or exclude people and establish authority. We’ll see how it can grant legitimacy, challenge authority, and fundamentally alter our relationship with our reader, each other, and the more-than-human world, turning a river into the river that sustains a community, or simply river who has agency, or positioning nature as a resource to be used or as the Earth to which we belong. This single decision shifts the entire emotional, political, and ecological landscape of a statement.

You will leave with the ability to spot this influence everywhere and to use it with intention—crafting sentences and poetic lines that are more persuasive, prose that is more powerful, and arguments that are impossible to ignore.

Note: All curious minds are welcome. The only prerequisite is a fascination with how language truly works.

CMarie Fuhrman is a poet and author whose work is inspired by the Western landscape. She is the author of Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return and the poetry chapbook Camped Beneath the Dam, as well as the co-editor of two significant anthologies, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has poetry and nonfiction published or forthcoming in a variety of publications, including Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, Alta Magazine, Northwest Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Northwest, Big Sky Journal, and various anthologies. CMarie is the director of the Elk River Writers Workshop and an award-winning columnist for The Inlander. She is the associate director of Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing and the founder of Confluence Writing Community. CMarie is the host of Terra Firma, a Colorado Public Radio program. She is a former Idaho Writer in Residence and lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho, where she spends summer days working as a fire lookout.

www.cmariefuhrman.com