Teaching

Yun is available to teach poetry and fiction workshops, ranging from beginner to intensive lessons, both in-person and virtual. Workshops are usually a mix of lecture, critical reading and active writing exercises, and can be adapted to the group. See below for examples of past workshops taught at the International Women's Writing Guild, Geneva Writers Group, and the Swiss Creative Writing Prize.

Please use the contact form for any booking inquiries.

Hope and Renewal: How to Breathe New Life in Your Poetry

Have you been languishing in your writing life? Do you have an old poem that you want to dust off and make new? Are you struggling to put an experience into words that surprises and sharpens the senses? Join our study of Lyn Hejinian’s technique for unpredictability, and poets of hope like Ada Limon and e.e. cummings. From creating razor-sharp metaphors to injecting surprise and hope in your work, this workshop will include brief lectures and group exercises.

Wanderlust: A Poetry Workshop

Trek across the many landscapes of poetry and explore the worlds that inhabit the spaces of the page. How do you make the reader experience both the familiar and the unknown? Through readings and writing exercises, we will learn techniques to create intimacy, distance and lustful metaphors. Guided by poets such as Natalie Diaz, Jenny Xie, Ada Limon and Adrienne Rich, your work will travel to unexpected places.

The Five Senses of Fiction

The best of fiction immerses the audience in a specific and memorable experience, or as Flannery O’Connor puts it, “the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him.” The most direct way of pulling your reader into the experience is by activating their five senses. In this workshop, we will look at how sight infuses settings with emotion, how sound creates atmosphere, how smell and taste build a specific cultural setting, and how touch connects us to each other and the physical world. We will examine prose excerpts where the five senses are maximized, and we will apply the senses in practical exercises to produce stories that breathe beyond the page.

What Can Poetry and Fiction Learn From Each Other?

Just as there are stereotypes about poets and novelists, there are many pre-conceptions about poetry and fiction as separate and opposing forms, governed by different values and objectives. Fiction is seen as leading narrative and characterization, while poetry is perceived as a more effective vehicle for abstraction and the aesthetics of language. The reality is that each of these forms can learn a great deal from each other. In this workshop, we will be examining how the structures and devices of one form can help the other generate stronger work and provide a framework for editing. We will look at how the characterization and logistics of fiction can sharpen the purpose of your poems. We will see how poetry can calibrate the voice and language of your fiction, and act as a catalyst for experimentation. We will study the works of great writers who have blurred the lines between forms, then put techniques into practice with writing exercises.

Poetry in Activism

There are few more private acts than writing poetry, yet activism is a public one. How can we use the power of poetry to enact change in the world? How can individual writing lead to community? How can your truth be written to awaken, unsettle and start a movement? Adrienne Rich called poetry “the liquid voice that can wear through stone.” We will study poets who did not hesitate to use their liquid voices to change minds, and writing exercises will put it into practice.