In this graduate workshop, we will reflect on ways of depicting, inhabiting, vocalizing, mythologizing, and troubling childhood in our writing. We will consider the variety of undertakings that ‘writing the child’ may actually connote—is there such a thing, really, as writing in a child’s voice or from a child’s perspective?—and the ways in which depicting childhood may provide unique opportunities for discovery, complexity, and even transcendence.  While considering work by a wide variety of authors (e.g. Molly McCully Brown Lucie Brock-Broido, Sarah Shun Lien Bynum, Li-Young Lee, Audre Lorde, Brenda Shaughnessy, Susan Stewart, Tarjei Vessas, Elissa Washuta), we will reckon, in our own work, with the child as (among other things) innocent, prophet, muse, disciple, priest, victim, and predator. We will also (as ever) engage with other media, including opera (The Turn of the Screw, Benjamin Britten), film (Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson, dir.), and photography (Sally Mann, Lewis Carroll). While this is a poetry workshop, and will therefore apply a poet's lens to form, diction, and syntax, it is open to writers in any genre. Students will have the option of continuing to work on ongoing projects or beginning new ones.