The Waning Garden
inspired by fading gardens, expired film, and dreamscapes
Ideas rarely arrive from nowhere. They grow through contact, accumulation, and cross-pollination.
The Waning Garden is a two-week creative residency devoted to the fertile edge between image and language.
Together, we will explore collage, photography, visual art, film, color, landscape, memory, and found language. We will gather images before we know what they mean and place unlike things beside one another to see what sparks.
The image is one of the smallest building blocks of poem and story.
Sometimes the whole work begins there.
When your work needs new material
Creative ruts are often described as a failure of discipline, but sometimes we have simply been working with the same materials for too long.
We return to the same themes, images, sentences, and emotional weather. We ask our minds to produce something new without giving them anything new to metabolize.
Then we watch a film that rearranges the furniture in our heads. We visit a gallery, have an unusually honest conversation, walk through an unfamiliar landscape, or find an old photograph at the bottom of a drawer.
Suddenly, something begins moving again.
The Waning Garden is designed to encourage that movement. For two weeks, we will build a rich reservoir of visual and sensory material, then follow the patterns, memories, and possibilities that emerge.
You do not need to arrive with a project. You do not need to know what you are making.
You only need to be willing to gather.
What you will leave with
By the end of the residency, you will have created a personal archive of collages, images, language fragments, colors, memories, and recurring motifs.
You may also leave with:
New material for poems, essays, stories, or visual work
Several finished experiments in image and language
A clearer sense of the private imagery already alive in your work
New ways to move between visual art and writing
A generative practice you can return to when your usual methods feel stale
The first strange beginnings of a new poem, sequence, story, or larger project
This is a generative studio. The goal is to make fertile material rather than polished work.
What’s included
Four lush, image-filled letters
Four substantial letters filled with images, reflections, and creative invitations exploring collage, photography, visual art, color, landscape, memory, and the private patterns of your imagination.
Two weeks inside The Garden
A private Circle community where we can gather, share what we are making, ask questions, and respond to one another’s work away from the noise of social media.
You are welcome to participate actively or wander through quietly. One person’s image may awaken a memory in someone else. A conversation may send the work in an entirely new direction.
A live Scrying the Photograph workshop
Sunday, September 6, from 3–5 p.m. Eastern
Together, we will use strange and evocative photographs as portals into image, memory, intuition, and new creative material.
We will enter photographs as we might enter dreams or unwritten stories, looking beyond their obvious subjects toward atmosphere, tension, gesture, absence, and possibility.
A recording will be available for anyone unable to attend live.
Guidance and feedback throughout the residency
I will be present inside The Garden for questions, conversation, creative feedback, and weekly check-ins as the work unfolds.
Because this is a generative studio, feedback will focus on resonance, possibility, recurring images, and where the work might lead you next.
What feels alive here?
What keeps returning?
What might happen if you followed it?
Who is this for?
The Waning Garden is for poets, writers, photographers, visual artists, journal keepers, and creatively curious people who want to work beyond the boundaries of a single form.
You may especially enjoy it if your work has begun to feel repetitive, you are tired of conventional writing prompts, or you are curious about collage, film, photographs, dreams, visual storytelling, and the secret life of images.
No experience with visual art or photography is required. You do not need expensive supplies, specialized skills, or a perfectly coherent explanation for what you make.
Registration
Tuition: $125
Enrollment is limited to 30 participants so I can remain genuinely present in the community and respond thoughtfully to the work being shared.
Paid Earth & Verse subscribers will receive early access and a steep subscriber discount.
For two weeks, we will make a small creative world together.
We will gather images. Let them cross-pollinate. Follow the strange thread.
And see what begins to grow at the edges.
Why learn from me?
I’m Alix Klingenberg, a published poet, Senior Poetry Editor at Phil Lit Journal, artist, creative coach, and earth-centered teacher with over a decade of experience helping others bring their work into the world.
This course is rooted in my own experience as a poet and a reader of poetry. It blends the practical (how to order a manuscript, what contests to submit to) with the poetic (how to find the throughline, how to honor what you’ve written). It’s not about making your work more marketable. It’s about making it more fully itself.
I’ve published 4 poetry collections; 2 self-published, and 2 traditionally published (including my forthcoming collection, Quietly Wild, which came out last fall with Mandala Earth Publishing!)
My poems have been featured in literary magazines, anthologies, in commercial ads, and all over social media. I’ve taught workshops to hundreds of writers, from first-timers to MFA graduates, and I cannot wait to see your books coming together.
I understand the vulnerability of putting your work out there. I also understand the deep satisfaction of finally seeing it in print!
What’s included?
Five days of carefully crafted emails that walk you through the Chapbook process step by step
Two recorded video lessons, each packed with editorial guidance, publishing insights, and ideas for structuring and editing your book.
Pricing
General enrollment: $125 (full course over the summer was $225)
Paid subscribers to Earth & Verse can get a discount of $25 by messaging me on Substack!
A creative studio for writers who want to break out of a box of their own creation.