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I liked that the craft sessions were a low pressure but intensive time to discuss a specific aspect of writing with a pro… It was very inspirational to me and to the others present who’d all been struggling with the same issues.
—’11 participant
Daily craft sessions provide contexts for faculty and writers in residence to discuss diverse issues of craft, process, and inspiration, or to lead exercises exploring technique and imagination. They provide excellent opportunities for participants to engage with poets and writers other than their workshop leader.
I really appreciated how varied the topics were. I learned something valuable and different from each of them.
—’11 participant
Participants in the 2012 Institute will receive a schedule of 2012 craft session offerings in the spring, and will have the opportunity to sign up for the ones that interest them most. To get a sense of the range of offerings, here are descriptions from June 2011:
STEVE ALMOND:
FUNNY IS THE NEW DEEP
Contrary to Aristotlean Doctrine (and popular belief) writing funny doesn't mean sacrificing depth. On the contrary, for most literary writers the comic impulse is inextricably linked to tragedy. In this informal class, we'll look at the work of contemporary masters such as George Saunders and Lorrie Moore in an effort to re-envision the comic impulse as a means of reaching forbidden emotions, an expression of rage and desperation, and path toward mercy. (Everyone who enrolls is guaranteed a writing job on the Daily Show or your money back!).
HEATHER CHRISTLE:
ON TRUST
As language begins to be written or read, the humans on either end of it are often strangers to each another. Who is this person with all her utterances? Who is this blurred figure I catch peering into what I have made? It can be difficult for reader and writer to trust each other at first, and both of them may wonder what to make of the words joining them together. In this session, we’ll discuss ways to develop trust and reasons why it might improve our experience of reading and writing. We will listen to voices familiar and strange. We will consider the effects of ignoring the reader and addressing her directly. We will look into how we might prepare ourselves as readers to meet and enjoy a strange new book. We will ask what and how a poem or story or other word object might think of us, and what that does to our reading. We will consider the conduit of written language as the site of nearly magical exchange.
EILEEN MYLES:
FACT AND FICTION FOR POETS
Actually this gathering is for anyone who feels a need to step outside of the bounds of what they do normally in poetry, fiction, non-fiction or skywriting. I’m thinking this might be an opportunity to share ideas about a potentially messy practice and the beauties that might unfold from sticking with it. So I’m thinking we might talk about the most outlandish thing we’ve wanted to write or shamefully conservative and talk about how that might be accomplished. I’m thinking in general about speech-making, bullshitting and lying, recruiting, cut and paste, aestheticizing the wrong thing and yet, and yet I also think there’s nothing wrong with wanting the reading experience to be somewhat pleasurable. I’m not down on narrative or first person but utterly against epiphanies, redemption any religious sounding pay-off for writing a beautiful story. So what are we doing here. I’m thinking for sure we are not writing poems, while proclaiming myself a poet. I’d say I’m inviting people who’d like to both get their dress dirty and write PROSE and I will deliver a reading list, some stirring angles on potential and actual writing practice and ultimately I’d like to think of this group as a brainstorming session for a show in which each of us will eventually write an episode of our idea, even if we only just get started on that opus in our day or two.
JENNY OFFIL:
HOW TO PAY ATTENTION: A LESSON IN 10 SENTENCES
“We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much,” Robert Walser said. But too often we look at the world through the dulling lens of convention. This will be a class about how to attend to the things around us in all their peculiar beauty. A particular emphasis will be placed on how to notice what others might overlook- the small, the modest, the ordinary, and how we might transform such things with the force of our attention. We will read and discuss 10 sentences in which writers have attempted to describe the exact nature of a moment. Rilke will no doubt be invoked. Meister Eckhart may come into play. We will talk about the science of attention, false and true lyricism, the Book of Splendor, and that category of the terrifying known as the sublime. Also what the poets know, but the fiction writers have forgotten. Near the end of the session, we will go for a walk; then we will return and write our own sentences.
DARA WIER:
BABY TAKE A CHANCE WITH ME
“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing."
—Meister Eckhart
Risk taking, risk evaluation, risk avoidance are all leaned up against when one decides to become a writer and decides how to write what one writes. We hear writers say to one another all the time: how did you get away with that! Or, I can't believe you got away with that! We admire how writers get away with things in writing. Why is this? What attracts us to this? Obviously, at least partly, because in that expression is implicitly also unsaid: Hmmmmm, I don't know if I could have let myself do that. Courage, recklessness, intention, all big things writers concern themselves with on a word by word basis. We will also expand our conversation into areas that involve Chance, Chance Operations, Generative Procedures, Erasure, Treated Texts, Ouilipian& other contingent constraints and why these are experiencing a renewed popularity. We will also take up issues of agency and accountability. And maybe we'll get around to talking about how to attract a Muse.
 NOY HOLLAND:
We read, in part, to be lifted away from the daily. We want mystery, scope, relief from the weight of detail. Fiction provides a haven, sometimes even from itself. It can swerve, rupture, disburden. It can lift out and away. This lifting away reminds us of the pleasing elasticity of being we know to be true and forget. On certain pages of prose (poetry too) we are reminded to see more deeply, perhaps more widely, as though an aperture has been opened, as though time has been dilated and space. What emerges from the rupture might be wisdom, a confession of fear, a declaration of fury, or love. Love and fury and wisdom and fear have accumulated line by line: the rupture feels at once spontaneous and inevitable, an impulse that overwhelms intention. The rupture is larger than the story and yet contained by it and it can take your breath away. Recollection and premonition; accumulation and release. The rupture is not explanation but declaration: People require strengthening before the acts of life. (Grace Paley) I am vacation from love. (William Gass) My questions for the time we have together will be: how do writers accomplish this feat? How might we invite it?
PAUL LISICKY:
ON PROSE STYLE
Why does prose style matter? How do the various elements of craft—syntax, figuration, tone, paragraphing, and anything else you can think of—contribute to content? In this class we’ll examine the prose of a handful of writers and talk about the ways in which style furnishes meaning. We'll also try out an exercise inspired by these excerpts in an effort to become better readers and writers, attuned to nuance, mystery.
LISA OLSTEIN:
ON STARTING A JOURNEY, DO NOT TURN BACK — TITLES AND FIRST LINES
In this session we’ll investigate what titles do, how they interact with the first lines they precede, and how these inevitable and inevitably paired points of embarkation set poems (or stories) in motion. Through a combination of brainstorming, experimenting, example-mining, we’ll explore issues including, but not limited, to: logic, expectation, tone, association, sound, momentum, and address. We’ll additionally consider process, methodology, and source. (While most of our examples will be drawn from poetry, the issues we’ll discuss share considerable overlap with prose.)
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER:
MAKING LIGHTNING STRIKE
Sitting around waiting for the muse to come is a drag. Especially for busy people, who might only have a few hours a week to write, and don't want to have to hope that when they do finally have a chance to write, that this muse happens to be available, and feels like paying an electric and productive visit. Writers have different ways of solving this problem. One good solution is to use a writing exercise. Sometimes doing an exercise can generate raw material to turn into finished work later; at other times, nearly complete pieces of writing result. In this craft session I will give you a list of a wide variety of writing exercises I have assembled (and tried out myself) from many different sources, and we'll talk about the different ways they work. We will also look in detail at and try out a few particularly effective and representative ones. We will also discuss larger issues of why and how writing exercises, which can often seem highly arbitrary in their approach, and counter to traditional notions of creativity and inspiration, can be liberating and productive.
LENI ZUMAS:
ASTONISHING MONSTERS: HYBRID FORMS
From Theophrastus of ancient Greece and SeiShōnagon of tenth-century Japan to contemporary figures like Gloria Anzaldúa, KamauBrathwaite, Michel Butor, Anne Carson, and W. G. Sebald, writers have always pushed the limits of literary form and genre. What happens when essays act like poems, novels look like encyclopedias, and poems sound like instruction manuals? We’ll discuss texts that reveal the rich possibilities of hybrid schemes, and we’ll explore with short writing exercises how cross-pollination and genre-bending might galvanize our own work.
KATE KERNHEIMER:
TINY TALES
Speaking to the themes, settings, and style of fairy tales, Harvard scholar Maria Tatar has described fairy tales as "miniature, domestic myths." This short workshop will guide its participants to write tiny tales in any form, whether prose poem, prose narrative, manifesto, play, or script. Looking at two brief tales from the German tradition, "The Willful Child" and "The Rosebud," we will unearth their techniques (abstraction, flatness, everyday magic, and intuitive logic) and recall their violent and mythic themes. Each writer will then produce one complete, miniature, stylized, personal work with special attention to the domestic mise-en-scene. That is, expert practitioners all, we will write tiny tales of our own, participating in a salon-style, old, ever-innovating tradition of the art of retelling. As part of the content, I will read you snippets from new fairy tales by writers such as Kathryn Davis, Timothy Schaffert, and JoyelleMcSweeney. We will also look at images from Corinne May Botz's "Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death." We will also read and share our new tiny tales with an eye toward your future creations.
CHARLES D'AMBROSIO:
POINT OF VIEW
In a mix of lecture, discussion and selected readings, we’ll explore point of view, trying to enlarge our sense of its vitality, covering as much as possible, from picking a pronoun to completing the vision. Within any given story the point of view is a living organism, thriving or under threat, struggling for its place in the narrative, registering in tremendously sensitive fashion the moral or aesthetic dilemmas of the narrative. It has a presence in the story with desires, insights, limitations, a personality, even, that's not all that different from character. As readers we typically track a story by the movement of character but as writers we trace the arc of our creation and come to understand it through point of view. POV has a journey to complete as surely as your main character, and it can’t remain unmoved. It touches every aspect of your fiction. If a story has a wrong ending, a weakness in character, a slack narrative stretch, it’s very often a good idea to go back to the angle of vision and see what you can do to sharpen it. It's like dialing in the optic quality of a story, finding the resolution, in the fullest sense of that word—the focus and concentration, the clarity and definition, but also the courage and determination necessary to seeing the work through. In being true to the POV you declare your allegiance to the story, and you stand up for it, even when things get difficult. It tells the world that you love your creation, that all of it matters, that none of its concerns, whatever they may be, will be overlooked.
THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS:
SOMETHING PATTERNED, WILD AND FREE: TOWARD THE WIDESCREEN MATRIMONY OF PROSE AND POETIC DICTION
A discussion of the ways to widen how lines and sentences behave in stanzas. We will look inside words, at their edges, utterances and sound engines in order to discover narrative and non-narrative ways of progressing in our work. All literacy (visual, emotional, literary, folk) will be considered so that the poem reaches for an “active” wholeness and not just a logical “flat, fixed and finished” destination. Some discussion, also, of how we ask our readers to enter stanzas (through which doors) and of the types of lines and words that govern perspective and “control” will also be discussed.
MATTHEA HARVEY:
THE MERCURIAL WORLDS OF THE MIND: A SURVEY OF IMAGINARY WORLDS AND THEIR TIES TO THIS ONE.
Every time you put pen to paper, you are inventing a world, but perhaps you'd like to try creating one that looks less like your own? In this survey of imaginary worlds (for poets and fiction writers alike), we will look at these inventions as outlandish similes, connected to this world by varying lengths and thicknesses of likeness. We will map out how such worlds are created, focusing on poems by Margaret Cavendish, Rose Ausländer, Terrence Hayes and Anne Carson, stories by Salman Rushdie, Edwin Abbott, Enid Blyton and Italo Calvino as well as artwork by Donald Evans (who created stamps for imaginary countries, including ones named for types of pasta), PippilottiRist, The Royal Art Lodge and Nina Katchadourian. At the end of the talk, you will try writing a poem or short prose piece inspired by an entry from The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.
DOROTHEA LASKY:
WHAT IS COLOR IN POETRY OR IS IT THE WILD WIND IN THE SPACE OF THE WORD
“If red is in everything, it is not necessary." —Gertrude Stein
In this class, we will explore how we can best use color in our own work. We will read poetry by Maggie Nelson, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Weiner, Emily Dickinson, Bernadette Mayer and others and consider how the form of color can be expressed in poems through a set of exercises about the colors red, blue, purple, and green. Questions addressed will include: How do color and language relate? What kinds of ideas and impressions are contained in particular colors? How is color related to rhythm and sound? What other poets than those discussed have used color effectively?
The craft sessions opened me to more ways of thinking about writing. They helped link together in my mind all the little ‘pockets’ of experience and education, such as music, language, the possibility of research.
—’11 participant
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