Introducing Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

About Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is the 2009-2013 Poet Laureate of Kansas, a long-time transformative language artist, and the author or editor of 24 books, including poetry, memoir, fiction, non-fiction, and anthologies.  As a poet, fiction and non-fiction writer, teacher, mentor, and facilitator, she explores and celebrates how the spoken, written and sung word can help us live more meaningful and vibrant lives. The founder of Transformative Language Arts, she values social and personal transformation through the spoken, written and sung word.

Caryn brings to her classes over thirty years of experience teaching at the college level (including coordinating a master’s program at Goddard College) and facilitating community workshops and retreats around the country. As a beloved workshop facilitator with extensive experience she has led workshops for adults in transition, people living with physical or mental illness, intergenerational groups, and multi-cultural communities. She also offers writing and singing workshops and performances with singer-songwriter Kelley Hunt through their business, Brave Voice. With Kathryn Lorenzen, she co-leads Your Right Livelihood, a training to help people discern and plan their creative livelihoods. Along with Joy Roulier Sawyer, she has been teaching workshop and retreat facilitation through The Art of Facilitation. She also offers writing coaching to writers of poetry, memoir, fiction and mixed genre works.

Caryn’s book include: How Time Moves: New and Selection Poems, Miriam’s Well (a novel), Needle In Bone: How a Holocaust Survivor and Polish Resistance Right Beat the Odds and Found Each Other (nonfiction), Chasing Weather: Tornadoes, Templest, and Thunderous Skies in Word and Image with photographer Stephen Locke, and The Sky Begins at Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body. 

Visit Caryn’s website here: http://carynmirriamgoldberg.com

What existing writing inspires you to write?

So many! I carried Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language everywhere for me throughout my 20s, learning from Rich not just how essential it is to speak our truths but how I could live with greater integrity, especially in these lines from her poem, “Splittings”: “I choose to love      this time       for once/ with all my intelligence.”

Toni Morrison’s novels, especially Beloved, showed me the deepest potential of writing to heal, to make between us a clearing where we could gather and witness each other’s stories and histories. I also was rocked awake by the memoirs, poetry, and fiction of James McBride, Stephanie Mills, Joy Harjo, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Stafford, Fenton Johnson, Rumi, Amy Bloom, so many others.  

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

William Stafford wrote, “Language can do what it can’t say,” as well as so much other sage advice. What we do with words is far more than the sum of their parts. “Build it up and knock it down,” poet Jane Kenyon told me at a writing workshop at the Frost Place in New Hampshire many years ago. We keep creating something, then revising it into its best self. I also constantly tell myself and my students to listen to what the writing wants to be, not necessarily what we think it should be.

What made you want to be a writer?

I was a kid artist, drawing obsessively from the time I could hold a crayon until about age 14 when my life fell apart. My parents were in the middle of a violent divorce that ripped apart my extended family, and I suddenly needed words…..desperately. So I sat on the stoop of a friend’s apartment building and wrote a poem. Once I started, I couldn’t stop because making things with words, just like making things with paint, pencils, or pastels, quickly became my way of making sense of the world and surviving hardships. Writing was my lifeline to healing, meaning, and connection, and it still is.

What are your current writing projects?

I’m putting the finishing touches on The Magic Eye, my memoir about surviving a rare and deadly eye cancer while also, with my husband, finding a way to save the family land where we live in Kansas, a place of native prairie and emerging woodlands. I’m also deep in the soup of a new poetry collection called Back on Earth, exploring time, place, the body, loss, and renewal.

What do you like to do outside of writing?

After decades of just dabbling in art since I began writing poetry, I realized I had been accumulating a whole lot of pencils and other art supplies without knowing exactly why. Then early in the fall of 2023, I started drawing again, mostly trees, which is what I mostly drew as a kid, and now I’m drawing a whole lot each week, including playing with pastels and watercolors along the way. It’s a great way for me to step outside the realm of words and listen to the language of branches, birds, and weather…..all of which helps feed my writing too.

Check out Caryn’s upcoming course! 

The Body and Soul of Your Memoir: Shape, Focus, and Write Your Memoir 

Unearth your memoir’s soul (its main focus and calling) and body (its organization and structure) as you write toward a completed draft. 

The Body and Soul of Your Memoir: Shape, Focus, and Write Your Memoir