Welcome to our bookstore.

Empowering writers and students with tools for growth.

At Gilliam Writers Group, we've spent years helping writers of all ages and stages hone their craft and achieve their goals. Now, we're thrilled to share a new way to support your creative or educational journey—our growing collection of expertly crafted writing workbooks.

Whether you're a student looking to sharpen your skills; a teacher seeking original, engaging classroom materials; or a writer striving to elevate your creative practice, you'll find practical, elegant tools here to guide you.

Explore our original worktexts, and take the next steps on your path with Gilliam Writers Group by your side.

Start discovering.

Start creating.

Start writing.

Start discovering. Start creating. Start writing.

The Bow & the Well: A Poetry Workbook

An experimental poetry workbook for teenagers and young adults.

$35.00

Every poem starts with a mess.

Think of a poem on a page. See the title, the byline. Notice the shape of its stanzas, the empty, bright space that cocoons them. A finished poem looks, at first glance, like a pearl: perfect, smooth, unassailable. But its polished surface hides the rough core of its creation—all the botched phrases and failed metaphors that were necessary steps in the writer’s learning process. No matter how perfect it appears, every poem starts with a mess, with a page interrupted by ink. 

The Bow and the Well invites students and beginners to embrace that mess, guiding you through a series of hands-on writing experiments with a playful, irreverent touch. Combining practical instruction with room for discovery, this workbook helps you craft your own poems while leaving space for trial and error. 

  • The author draws on years of experience as a professional writing instructor to distill key aspects of the poem-writing process into modules that encourage you to write through moments of utmost difficulty, and then keep going. You can adapt each module to your unique creative process, allowing you to work through the text at your own pace, whether with friends or individually. 

    So grab your workbook. 

    Grab your pen. (We tend to enjoy black gel pens in .38. Or mechanical drafting pencils in .05. Or a plain old #2.) 

    It’s time to write. 

  • At Gilliam Writers Group, our faculty are professional poets, novelists, and academics who have years of experience teaching the art and craft of writing. We share our expertise through one-on-one tutoring and writing coaching sessions with students of all ages—tailored yet carefully structured meetings that take place in real time on a regular basis, often for many years. Our pedagogy is founded in the belief that good writing connects and transforms both writers and their audiences; this is the promise of literature, and in our view, poetry fulfills this promise in a truly special way. As one of our oldest, most mysterious forms of creative expression, it’s somehow essential to the human experience. Yet we realize that many young poets with vast creative potential just don’t have the time or money to dedicate to weekly coaching sessions. That’s where this workbook comes in. 

    The Bow and the Well, our poetry workbook for teenagers and young adults, is designed to emulate the personal experience of a Gilliam Writers Group tutoring session. It’s meant to feel like an open-ended discussion rather than a prescriptive instruction manual, creating space for a truly generative, joyful experience to unfold for the budding poet (or for the noncommittal dabbler, if that’s more your speed). Our workbook balances respect for poetic tradition with the flexibility and playfulness we encourage our faculty to bring to real-time instruction, and this balance allows the reader to adapt their experience of the book to their own state of mind on any given day. Wherever you are, this text will meet you there—just like a private instructor. 

    We’ve produced The Bow and the Well with teens in mind, for a couple of reasons. Teenagers, like all great poets, are incredibly open to unfamiliar, out-of-the-ordinary experiences. They also tend to read widely, since their tastes are still evolving; like adults, they know what they know and like what they like, but unlike adults, they are usually just as motivated by what they don’t know, and don’t know if they like. In our work with students of all ages, our faculty have found that teens are uniquely strong in poetry’s central skill set: looking, and learning, without assumptions. One of our main goals as an education company is to shape the future of literary practice, and that means developing original, cutting-edge learning materials specifically for young writers. 

    That said, we believe anyone, no matter their age, will enjoy this workbook if they can set aside judgment and fear of failure, and embrace uncertainty—along with all its attendant possibilities—instead.