Residency Artist - Creative Writing

Wendy McVicker

5 Sunnyside Dr.
Athens, OH  45701-1919
Phone: (740) 594-4609
Email: wendymcvicker@gmail.com

I am a creative writer, working mostly with poetry. Language is all around us, and the English language is particularly rich. What I love is to reveal this gift to language users of all ages and varieties of experience. My favorite school residencies have involved collaborations, with students as well as teachers in many disciplines. We use poetry (the language of our deepest knowledge) to explore mythology, nature, the world around and within us. A recent residency with middle school students involved studying classical Chinese poetry and painting, and modern poetry descended from this work, in preparation for their spring retreat at a state park. I have also recently had the enormous pleasure of working with older adults in a community arts setting, exploring their rich treasures of memory through drawing as well as writing, inside and out.

This past year, I have enjoyed working with dancers and musicians, to create pieces that bring together words, music and movement in multi–dimensional performances that explore common human experiences. I continue to write and publish poems, most recently in the Endicott Journal of Mythic Arts and Confluence, and (upcoming) in Riverwind. I return again and again to that inner voice that seeks and finds expression in metaphor, in poetry.

I have been writing all of my life, but until I had children most of my adult writing was academic or epistolary. My BA is in Philosophy. I have studied with poets Wayne Dodd and John Haines at Ohio University. I have been publishing poems in small journals since 1986, and working with writers of all ages in schools, libraries, and art galleries, since 1988.