The Joy Regime

At such a joy-stealing—even joy-crushing—time, how might we cultivate joy, especially as many of us are overwhelmed, unable to write from emotions other than grief and rage? How might we reclaim joy without guilt or shame, much less write from such an "inappropriate" emotion when joy might be seen as betrayal of pain given the state of the world? How might you give yourself permission not only to experience joy but to write it onto the page? In our time together guided by award-winning poet Nickole Brown, we'll explore how a number of poets face this dilemma to find their joy and delight, despite (and even because of) the news. Our time together will be dedicated to sharing pragmatic, achievable steps you can take, and then we'll try our hand at writing and sharing words that proclaim joy as necessary, because it is. Because joy—like poetry—can be an act of resistance, can be a way to move towards solidarity and survival and justice, and ultimately, may well be a refusal to surrender what might make life worth the fight to keep living.

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. Her poem “Parable” won the 2024 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize and was published as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day initiative. Every summer, she teaches as part of the low-residency MFA Program at the Sewanee School of Letters in Tennessee. She’s a proud Fellow of the Black Earth Institute and is President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, a nonprofit organization that aims to nurture a community hellbent on finding the words that protect and repair our climate-changed world.