Help Fund Maghan's Writing Practice ❤️

*The total goal has been updated due to unexpected financial issues that have come up*

Hi sweet friends, new and old. My name is Maghan , I'm a poet, collage-maker, mover, and teacher living in Western Massachusetts. This summer I will be doing a 10-day artist residency/independent study at Poco a Poco in Oaxaca, Mexico.

 

The cost of the program is $600. The additional money will be used for travel costs and meals while I am away. I will also accept donations via venmo (@maghbag) or cashapp ($maghbag). Unfortunately, as a teacher at a non-profit school, I do not get paid during the summer months that I am not teaching. Any help is greatly appreciated. Much of what I love I cannot do without the lift of my community. Read a little more about my writing/creative practice below:

 

 

 

 

Being an interdisciplinary artist is extremely important to me, as so much of my poetry writing is informed by the other ways that I engage with other makers and mediums. My work has always been both deeply collaborative and quietly personal. Much of my desire to create comes from shared experiences and conversations with others as well as through an internal exchange of ideas and thoughts. I've noticed that one does not exist without the other -- I need to be in conversation with others in order to fine-tune and negotiate with myself about how and what I want to create.

 

Currently, as a teacher of poetry to high schoolers, I use what I've learned from other educators, poets, and workshops to communicate with them about the various ways they are allowed to open themselves up to creative practice and approach poetry. But my students are not just writers -- they are painters, collagists, astrologers-in-the-making, woodworkers, and more. My greatest pleasure has been communicating with them through different mediums in order to help us all approach writing with new language and from different angles.

 

I've reconnected with myself as a dancer in the past year and have taken up ceramics. Questions I am asking myself: how does the forgiving nature of clay allow me to forgive myself as a writer? Where does my natural desire for movement inform my natural inclination to engage in the written word? What muscles am I using to engage in all of these acts? What is improvised? What is rehearsed or ritualized?

 

I thank you for your generosity and care.