Bearing Witness: Writing Our Self in the World

Explore how poems hold personal experience, bear witness to the larger world, and become acts of remembrance.

Red River Review’s Bearing Witness writing class explores poetry as witness, remembrance, and living record. Facilitated by Editor-in-Chief Heather Robinson Hernandez, the class considers how our private lives intersect with the histories, communities, and conditions that shape them. We will also examine how a poem can serve as a memorial and how reading becomes an act of remembrance.

Through readings from Carolyn Forché, Czesław Miłosz, and other poets, along with guided discussion, we will explore how poetry of witness has developed over time. Its markers—including invitation, intimacy, image, voice, address, scene, and recollection—will provide a lens for reading selected poems and considering who witnesses, who is witnessed, and what changes through the encounter.

Together, we will examine how these choices help poems create meaning, make experience felt, and resonate with readers. Generative writing prompts will invite you to use them as techniques in your own work, drawing on memory, place, lived experience, and inherited histories.

You will leave with:

• New writing to develop further.
• An understanding of poetry of witness and its development.
• Greater confidence reading poems closely.
• Practical techniques for creating presence, intimacy, and resonance.

Date: Saturday, October 10, 2026
Time: 9:00 a.m.–1:30 p.m. MDT
Location: Online via Google Meet
Format: Four-hour generative writing class with a 30-minute lunch / screen break

No prior experience with close reading or poetry of witness is needed. A reading and listening packet will be provided before class.