Description
To get hold of what we most want to use, within ourselves, and from what we have seen and heard and lived and explored in the world and in books, we can learn a method of paying attention to intuition at a deep level by thinking with what psychoanalysis calls our “object world.”
This workshop is about acquiring a method for doing this–both for the sake of beginning new work and revising work that could be taken deeper, and finding our way forward in work that’s in progress. Each of us may find different models of this, among our readings. I’ll send you our readings in poetry, fiction, and cnf as pdf’s, and I’ll include pages from the work of the (unusually literary) psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, and creative work. We will not be discussing every piece that I send to you all; instead, I’d like you to respond to the specific readings that enrich your sense of what you want to do. We’ll draw from the stances and techniques and language and forms of a number of writers in all three genres, while focusing in our own work on just a few—but going into them as deeply as we can to get a sense of how we experience these writers’ language, focus, images, characters, voices, movement, etc.
Samples of the work of writers I’ve chosen will be fairly brief. Fiction writers may include Amy Hempel, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Gina Berriault, Willa Cather, William Goyen; poets may include Basil Bunting, Robert Duncan, Patricia Smith, Seamus Heaney, Lorine Niedecker, Kimiko Hahn; creative nonfiction writers may include Geoff Dyer, Marga Minko, Kimiko Hahn. Each writer will show remind us (me too!) of ways of sustaining and deepening our individual writing processes of feeling, thinking, visualizing, articulating, and sequencing.
