Have you ever heard a question that made you change the way you think about the world? Some of our most profound ideas come to us when we are engaged with a productive question. Maieutic teaching uses curiosity and exploration to draw out insights that may be on the tip of your tongue and knowledge you already have but can’t access. In maieutic poetry coaching, in short, we ask you questions that you can answer, and by answering them your poetry improves.

Coaching that is maieutic seeks to center the artist in their own practice and help them to flourish while maintaining their unique voice, vision, and agency. You can hear the maia (classical Greek for midwife) in the name of this approach. Maieutic teaching is also known as the Socratic method, and is used in law schools, but for poetry, the tone of a lecture hall is the opposite of what we seek to cultivate. Our approach is curious, patient, exploratory, and tailored to your specific artistic practice or existing manuscript.

It is the coach’s responsibility to think critically about where the work and the poet are now, and find paths forward for them without constraining the poet’s ability to make their own choices. It is the poet’s responsibility to take the coach’s line of thinking seriously, even when going “off the board” with their decisions. In this way, the maieutic coach forms a support system and acts as a resource, never as a guru or by making prescriptive pronouncements about the right way to write. The goal is, solely, your satisfaction with the art and the creative process, and therefore we take a positive rather than a negative approach.

Your maieutic poetry coach asks you carefully-posed questions to reveal the best in your existing poems, to create a map for generative writing sessions, and to help you clarify how your art is best composed on paper. We engage in questioning after close and thoughtful reading of your work on its own terms, without adherence to any particular school, style, or tradition on our part. We aim to make each poem the most fully-realized version of itself.

In practical terms, your maieutic poetry coach will use some combination of videochat or voice conferences, comments on drafts, and email to create space for asking and answering both big—”How do I find my unique voice?”—and tiny—”What about this comma?”—poetry questions, and deliver your writing into the world.