Empowering our Creativity, Together
Frances is available for myriad speaking opportunities, including keynotes, hands-on workshops, book readings, and more. Browse the list of example speaking themes below. Interested in hiring Frances for a speaking engagement? Reach out today!
Keynotes
Thinking Like a Poet: Is the MFA the New MBA?
A twenty-to-thirty-minute talk about how many business skills can be outsourced, but arts experience is more resilient and of the body: artists are the purest form of entrepreneur. They collaborate and can stand tough critics and failure, shift to new approaches and perspectives, have visual acuity and are articulate in real time. Case studies of two people and discussion of The Poet in the C-Suite.
Think Like a Poet to Find Your Authentic Voice in Management
A twenty-to-thirty-minute talk about how poets build voices and how that can play out in real time, at work. The very methods that artists use, drawing on their own responses to things, being curious and receptive, trying draft after draft, their immersion in their craft—these give us a way to navigate the workplace.
Getting Over It: How the Arts Can Infiltrate Business and Expand Their Audience
For decades, funders have been asking artists and arts to adopt more business practices. Artists have complied. These days, it’s the business that needs to take on creative practices in leadership and implementation. Where can the arts become part of HR without hosting paint-on-pottery studios? How can deeper craft skills play a part of workplace dynamics.
Writing Workshops
Your Floating Shed: A Poetry and Flash Fiction Studio
Charles Taylor, author of Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, describes interspace as the space between a poet and the world. It’s that liminal zone between objectivity and subjectivity. Another way of thinking about it is as a floating shed. A dream zone. The shed is yours, floating around you and filling with images, experiences and reflections. This writing studio will cull material for your floating shed and we’ll use this to draft poems or flash fiction in real time.
Leaning into the Material of Your Day Job: A Poetry Studio
Do you try to write poems and find your mind drifting to your workplace? Are you in the midst of a free write when you see that you are making a to-do list? Or analyzing the motives of a co-worker? Mind-hook, or monkey-mind, is better embraced than banished in a creative process. In this poetry studio, we’ll surface images and realizations from your day job and refashion these into drafts of poems. Or, for those of you who want to use your day jobs to push into new terrain, we’ll shuffle the syntax and diction of your other profession into completely new visions. Be ready to conjure phrases and rearrange them into novel and surprising material for poems.
Professional Development Seminars for Undergraduates
Help! How do I use my arts/humanities degree in job applications?
These can be a one- or a two-hour seminar.
In a one-hour seminar, we’ll discuss and create lists of how your studies in the arts and humanities have taught you skills that employers want. Then, we’ll make phrases and sentences that you can use in resumes, cvs and cover letters.
In a two-hour seminar, we’ll use these lists to create a stance for your job search and applications. Here’s an example: A creative writing major who minored in physics. I know how things work and how to bring people and ideas together into imaginative, coherent expressions. Or: An art history major whose skills in studying and researching images advances visual interpretation and understanding in a workplace.
In both seminars, we’ll discuss The Poet in the C-Suite.
Thinking Like a Poet: Being Curious and Collaborating for Better Work—A Seminar to Imagine Your Future Workplace Self and How You Will Work with Other Humans
This is a one or a two-hour seminar.
In the one-hour seminar, we’ll draft poems from images we conjure together. Then, we’ll piece these into poems that explore new visions of what we already know how to do, and what we want to learn how to do or make. How will these drafts let us see new versions of our future selves?
In the two-hour seminar, each participant will create a set of core values about collaboration. What do you believe about working in a team? About holding others accountable? What are you like in group projects? How do you approach different colleagues? This document will help you with job interviews and to set up a good set of practices when you work with others.
Telling Your Origin Story: A seminar for undergraduates embarking on job searches
This two-hour seminar will help you tell your own story. Your experiences and perspectives are valuable, especially those you’ve created during your college education. We’ll use creative writing techniques to help you tell your own story. You’ll need this for job interviews, and it may startle you into realizing more about your potential career paths. In the end, you will have a document that you can use in many contexts.
Professional Development Seminars for Graduate MFA and MBA Students
A Collaborative Gathering of MBA and MFA students
In this two-hour learning space and book discussion circle, we’ll tour The Poet in the C-Suite and discuss what the arts have to bring leadership and business contexts. Then, we’ll each work together to write our origin stories.
An origin story is a compelling short narrative that describes who you are and how you got to this place in your career. It also infers the skills you are bringing to your graduate degree. MBA students will address how origin stories link to job calls and MFA students will invigorate the language of stories themselves. In the process, we’ll learn different collaborative methods.
Takeaways: each participant will create one five-sentence origin story and revise according to feedback. We make connections that expand our own perspectives about the job world and our creative capacities.
What Poets Have to Do with it: A Seminar for MBA students interested in developing lively language in their leadership
We’ll discuss The Poet in the C-Suite as a source to build voice and enhance leadership skills. This two-hour seminar will focus on new ways of expressing what your expertise is and how you’ve utilized it in the past. Along the way, we’ll weave in origin stories, other experiences you’ve had and some creative writing techniques to liven up how you speak and write.
Can You Use Your Skills as an Artist in Another Job? A Seminar for BA and MFA students
Artists are used to being self-motivated, responsive, strong collaborating and critics, articulate and imaginative. In other professions, these are treasured assets. Long in training to create things that other people never knew they needed, or wanted, artist are the purest entrepreneurs. They persist and work hard to get a marketplace for their work. This, too, is a strength.
At this point, you might be looking for a day job. Hopefully, that day job will have heart and intellect and not completely drain your creative tank. This two-hour studio will include a discussion of The Poet in the C Suite and a practice to develop a list of ways to describe yourself and your work to other professionals.
Professional Development Conversations in Corporate Venues
How Thinking Like a Poet May Help Us Think Outside the Box and Be More Imaginative
What Writing Poetry Does to Your Voice as a Leader
A College Professor in Literature and Creative Writing Talks about What Her Students Know How to Do and What They Don’t
Writing and Cultural Conversations or Readings in Humanities-Oriented places
Why a Poet is Breaking Down Barriers to Business Schools
The more poet Frances McCue got involved in startup organizations in the arts, the more she saw how businesses could benefit from the craft skills that artists have. Her latest book, The Poet in the C Suite: Bringing Artistry and Voice to Leadership, Innovation and Teamwork traces how leaders across professions—from a polar bear scientist working in Greenland to a media mogul who changed the way we think about publishing and the internet—these innovators use some of the same moves that poets do. And they can help all of us. Be ready for a lively discussion.
Does a Poet Ever Belong in a C-Suite?
When Frances McCue told her poet friends that she was barging into business schools with the ways that poets think and work, some were skeptical. A few were resistant. One was just plain angry. “Why give away our stuff when we don’t make any money?” this poet asked. McCue had a simple answer, “To make the world human-centered, we need to work together.” That’s how it began. McCue’s latest book, The Poet in the C Suite: Bringing Artistry and Voice to Leadership, Innovation and Teamwork, explores how the habits poets have cultivated can benefit startups and institutions, groups and workplaces. These habits are about receptivity, powerful feedback and a robust imagination.