PSNY Virtual Workshop: Soft Landing in a Hard Place

An all-levels generative virtual workshop with poet Lena Kassicieh!

Home is never just one place — it's a negotiation, a construction, sometimes a betrayal. How do we make soft landings in hard places? How do we cushion ourselves in cities that resist us, or leave places that finally felt soft? This workshop explores our complicated relationships with the places we inhabit, the cities we've left, and the geographies that shaped us whether we wanted them to or not. What does it mean to love a place that doesn't love you back? To grieve a city you never actually lived in? To feel most at home in airports, in-between spaces, or in a place that "should" feel foreign? Drawing from poets who write intimately about displacement, belonging, and geographic longing — Warsan Shire, Hala Alyan, Suji Kwock Kim, Natalie Diaz, and Danez Smith — we'll practice writing to and about place with the full messiness of romantic relationships: desire, resentment, longing, rupture, and radical honesty.We'll explore how we attempt to "make" places home through ritual, language, and creative practice—and what happens when a place refuses our attempts at intimacy. Bring your love affairs with cities, your one-sided relationships with landscapes, your messy divorces from hometowns.

About the Instructor: Lena Kassicieh is a Palestinian multidisciplinary artist and anthropologist whose work focuses on key themes of nostalgia, identity development, diaspora community, and folklore.

**This workshop will take place on Zoom.**