Teaching a class in Jan-Feb: WRITING THROUGH [ ]: A GENERATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP
Sorry I’ve been a little quiet in the reading blog! I’m hoping to have a new post up soon, but in the meantime, here’s the announcement for the generative writing workshop I’ll be teaching in January and February. See you there!
WRITING THROUGH [ ]: A GENERATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP
A Threshold Academy workshop
Instructor: Zoe Tuck
Sign up for all six weeks or a drop-in session here!
Time: 12:00pm-2:00pm ET
Dates: Saturdays, 1/8, 1/15, 1/22, 1/29, 2/5, 2/12
Meet on zoom
Description:
This is a writing-intensive workshop in which we will enter the space of writing through different activities, related to the senses and other arts adjacent to writing. Class time will be devoted to shared viewing/listening/moving/etc followed by writing. We will be sharing writing, but the emphasis of this class is on generating writing, not critiquing or editing it. WRITING THROUGH [ ] is designed especially for writers who are not writing or writers who are writing, but are feeling stuck. This class espouses what I’m thinking of as a kind of side-door poetics. That is, when you can’t go in through the front door of writing, come in through the side door (/window, chimney, etc), arriving at writing by means of other arts and practices.
In deference to my own poetic apprenticeship, we will begin by reading aloud together from a text, letting the rhythms of an author’s prosody co-regulate our rhythms, individually and as a group. From this we will begin to write through various techniques associated with reading, such as: annotation, copying, collage (cento), citation, and exegesis.
In week two, we’ll write through listening, inspired by the practices of composers and sound artists like Pauline Oliveros and Maryanne Amacher, tuning into our own domestic soundscapes as well as each other’s.
In week three, we’ll enter the space of the visual together, viewing segments of film and tv together, and adapting the grammar of visual language to our writing. We will think about diagesis, montage, etc, but also about the space where writing moves to extend the filmic in the form of fan fic and movie novelizations.
For week four, we will focus on movement and touch. What do our bodies know? What do they remember? In this week we will gently commune with various parts of our bodies, give them an audience and then write what we learn. Do you, like me, read CAConrad’s rituals and think about enacting them for yourself but never do? Today we’re going somatic.
Week five activates taste and smell. Food is culture and memory. Cooking, like writing, entails an apprenticeship and a poetics. What does writing’s poetics have to learn from cooking’s poetics? This week we will (I hope) de-emphasize originality in favor of chopping, applying heat, and seasoning to taste.
Week six: dress and self-presentation. Masks, drag, and the play of our own appearance is our portal this week. Pessoa may have written as his heteronyms, but did he dress up as them? Sometimes we cannot write, but we can masquerade as someone who can, or as someone who writes totally differently. If nothing else, we will have fun playing dress-up.