Week 9: August 11-17

Beyond the Personal: A Poetry Workshop

Martha Collins

In this workshop, we will focus on moving beyond personal experience and into material that involves historical, social, nature-related and/or other research, without sacrificing personal involvement and feeling. You needn’t have written this kind of poetry before; you will be encouraged to explore and at least begin working on poems using research material during the week. Research can be pursued online, or in the beautiful Provincetown Library, to which we will make a brief “field trip” at the end of the first session.

Biography

Martha Collins is the author, most recently, of White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012). She has also published the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), four earlier collections of poems, and two volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as an Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a Lannan Residency Grant. The founder of the creative writing program at UMass-Boston, she served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College until 2007, and as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in 2010. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD Magazine and the Oberlin College Press.

Students in this class (click on a name to see an example of their work):           

Wilderness Sarchild

Charles Madansky

Donna  Barkman

Alyson Adler           

Linda Umans

Carol Seitchik

Jeff Sugarman           

Shelia Bonnell           

Patricia Hemminger

Maxine Susman

Poem-to-Poem

Fred Marchant

Saul Bellow once said that a writer is a reader who has been moved to emulation, and there is no doubt that the poems we read, and how we read them, can play a major role in the poems we write. Sometimes we can be moved to imitation and emulation. It is also true that a given poem we have read can expand the horizons of possibility in our poems, both in content and/or in formal, technical matters. In addition, sometimes we might even write a poem in recoil from another’s poems. In short, we as poets are always in a conversation, tacit or otherwise, with other poems and other poets, and that conversation includes a spectrum of possible responses. In our workshop, our goal will be to write new poems daily. These new poems would in one way or another be inspired by poetry written by someone else. 

Biography

Fred Marchant is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Looking House (Graywolf Press), selected by Barnes & Noble Review and The San Francisco Chronicle as one of the best books of 2009. His first book, Tipping Point won the 1993 Washington Prize from The Word Works, and a twentieth anniversary second edition will be coming out in 2013. Marchant is also the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947, and the co-translator (with Nguyen Ba Chung) of A Corner of My Yard, by the Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa. He is the Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program and the Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston. He was the 2009 co-winner (with Afaa Michael Weaver) of the May Sarton Award, given to poets whose work is an inspiration to other poets.

Students in this class (click on a name to see an example of their work):           

Tony Howarth           

Leo Thibault

Kate Connors           

Judy Askew

Margaret Phillips

Transforming Chaos Into Art: Fiction and Memoir

Dani Shapiro

The most helpful writing workshops are ones in which the group acts as a single organism, its sole purpose being to help the piece of work at hand become its best possible self. Memoir, fiction -- it's all storytelling. Whether you're bringing in pages of a memoir-in-progress or a work of fiction, we will approach the page with an eye towards structure, character, voice, place, detail. This will be a week in which we read closely the work of our fellow participants, and find the tenacity and take-no-prisoners courage to do our finest work.

Biography

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, n+1, The New York Times Book Review, and The Los Angeles Times, and has been widely anthologized. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University, and she is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA Program at Brooklyn College. Her new book, Still Writing, will be out in 2013.

Students in this class (click on a name to see an example of their work):

Hank Martinson

Michael Geisser

Susan Katz

Deborah Schifter

Jill Bailey

Melinda Flores

Moira Taylor           

Buki Papillon           

Elizabeth Clark

Leslie Gueguen

The Art & Craft of Writing Effective Prose

Sarah Schulman

Each student’s work will be engaged on its own terms, with an eye towards craft, structure and making work active and dynamic with engaged language. Writers who are stark beginners as well as novelists and nonfiction writers working on their 3rd and 4th books will equally benefit. Authors will be encouraged to clarify the stakes of their work, articulate what emotional and formal questions they are grappling with, and deepen their understanding of why human beings do the things we do.

Biography

Sarah Schulman is the author of 17 books including 5 nonfiction books on such subjects as gentrification, Israel/Palestine and familial homophobia as well as 9 novels that have spanned genres from historical fiction, to literary novels, speculative fiction, experimental novels and even detective stories. Her awards include Guggenheim, Fulbright, three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. She is also a nonfiction writer, journalist, working playwright and screenwriter. Sarah is an experienced teacher, currently Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island.

Students in this class (click on a name to see an example of their work):

Gretchen Schultz

Devon Shanley

Maria Romano

Riggin Waugh           

Maha Hussain

What’s The Story?

James Lecesne

This workshop is designed to explore your individual myth, give voice to your emotional, political, and personal truth and create a story that will carry you into the world.  Whether you are working on a stage play, a one-person show, a screenplay, a TV pilot, or a novel, the basic rules of storytelling can help you discover the story you want to tell.  

While each student is encouraged to use the tools of story-making in his or her own way, this workshop is about learning the basic math of structure and story, applying those principals to your particular story and finding not only the spine of your story, but also its heart. -- how a story adds up and how structure carries your story into the world. Regardless of the form (stage play, screenplay, solo show), these universal principles of story can help us find not only the spine of a story but also the heart of it.

This workshop is designed to help writers excavate these personal beliefs and it provides the tools necessary to make a story. Teasing a story out of yourself can take years, but this five-day workshop will set you on your way and give you the tools to last a lifetime.

Biography

James Lecesne has been telling stories for over twenty-five years. He created several one-person shows including Word of Mouth, which won the New York Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award.  Trevor, which started out as a piece he performed in Word of Mouth, was made into a short film and went on to receive the Academy Award.  Trevor also inspired “The Trevor Project”, the only nationwide 24-hour suicide prevention and crisis intervention lifeline for LGBT and Questioning youth.  He created The Road Home: Stories of Children of War, which was presented at the Asia Society in New York City, as well as at the International Peace Initiative at the Hague.  For television, he adapted Armistead Maupin’s Further Tales of the City and has written for the popular television show Will & Grace.  Lecesne also founded The After The Storm Foundation, a non-profit arts organization designed to benefit the youth of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and he is the Executive Producer of the award winning documentary film, After the Storm.

He has written two novels for young adults and is the editor of an anthology entitled The Letter Q, a collection of letters by LGBT writers written to their younger selves. As an actor, James has appeared on stage in many plays, including the original Off-Broadway production of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9, the 30th anniversary production of Boys in the Band, the one-man play, Extraordinary Measures, written and directed by Eve Ensler, in Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, at Hartford Stage and in the 2012 revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man on Broadway.

Students in this class (click on a name to see an example of their work):

Stephen Soucy           

Beijing Charlie

Stephen Mandes

Susan Rand Brown

Discovering Drawing

Paul Stopforth

The need to draw lies at the heart of our desire to create images and it is an essential component in the lives of artists throughout history. The act of drawing reveals rich and complex ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to be human through the creation of images from an infinite variety of sources.

Through the use of a wide range of materials this course explores what it means to place marks on paper that begin to transform what we see into what we think and feel about ourselves and the objects we find in the world around us.

The course will provide a means of discovering drawing for the first time as well as a space to reconnect with the impulse and desire to draw. Through explorative drawing processes in conjunction with a wide range of graphic mediums you will develop, define and enrich your personal drawing practice.

This course will benefit those who wish to explore drawing for the first time as well as artists and teachers with ongoing studio practices.

Biography

Early in his career Paul Stopforth produced several bodies of work that were startling in their courageous engagement with the repressive society in which he lived. His uncompromising refusal to turn away from a world of pain and injustice cost him dearly, but earned him enormous respect from his peers and from discerning art critics who saw his work in its first youthful incarnations at The Market Theatre Gallery, where he was a director from 1977 to 1984.

Stopforth left South Africa for the United States in the late 1980s, despairing that there would ever be change in the country. He took up a teaching position at Harvard University and exhibited his work at many museums and galleries in the United States. He is currently on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Since 1971 he has exhibited his work in galleries and museums in South Africa, the United States and Europe. He has served as curator and juror for a number of institutions and competitions, and in 2004 he delivered the Ruth First Memorial Lecture at Brandeis University. His work is held in many public and private collections in South Africa and abroad.

Students in this class (click on a name to see an example of their work):

Hannah Brandes

Susan  Riegler           

Gerry Tuten

William Coles           

Mary Elizabeth Hartnett

Kathy Meyers

Susan Fornaro           

Kristen Wainwright

Michael Walczak

Dan Jay

The Narrative Portrait: A Photography Workshop

Amy Arbus

Like "The Country Doctor," by W. Eugene Smith from his legendary Life Magazine spread, we will explore the photo essay as a way to make a portrait of a person or people in context and over time. A powerful picture story sets the scene, introduces the characters, evokes a mood, and shows the action with all of its great or terrible consequences. It has all the drama of life. Participants are encouraged to think about possible story ideas before they arrive. Through slide presentations and critiques we will discuss techniques for lifestyle, photojournalism, fashion and traditional portraiture. Key topics will include approaching people, involving them in the process and helping them feel at ease. We will also cover the techniques for editing, sequencing and presentation.

Biography

Photographer Amy Arbus has published four books, including the award winning On the Street 1980-1990 and The Inconvenience of Being Born. The New Yorker called her most recent, The Fourth Wall, her masterpiece. Her advertising clients include Chiat/Day, Foote, Cone and Belding, American Express, Saatchi & Saatchi, SpotCo, New Line Cinema and Nickelodeon. Her photographs have appeared in over one hundred periodicals around the world, including New York Magazine, People, Dazed and Confused and The New York Times Magazine. She teaches portraiture at the International Center of Photography, Maine Media Workshops and NordPhotography in Norway. Amy Arbus is represented by The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown. She has had twenty-two solo exhibitions worldwide, and her photographs are a part of the collection of The New York Public Library and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Amy's portrait photo credit: Marion Ettlinger

Students in this class (click on a name to see an example of their work):

Debra Weinstein

Kathleen Williams

Diana Ronell           

Federico Roa           

Kim Leddy

Diane Lederman

Photoetching

Peik Larsen

In this workshop, students will investigate images by combining photos, artwork and collage on transparent surfaces. The transparencies are then transferred onto pre-sensitized zinc plate, exposed to sunlight or ultraviolet light table and developed at room temperature in a non-toxic water-based solution. The developed plate is then ready to be etched in any of the standard intaglio methods. Traditional and new etching techniques will be taught in conjunction with this process. Photoetching accelerates the printmaker’s working process before the first inked proof, which consequently pushes the inventive possibilities of the final print. Creative reworking of the matrix and imaginative application of printmaking skills will be emphasized. Paper and plates will be available at cost to students

Biography

Peik Larsen studied art at Middlebury College and the San Francisco Art Institute, and received an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts College graduate program. He has worked as a professional printer at Fox Graphics in Boston and Via Santa Reparata in Italy. He shows his paintings, prints, and books at Victoria Munroe Fine Art in Boston and Freight & Volume in New York City, and is in many collections in this country and in Europe. For several years he taught printmaking at Harvard and has been a visiting artist and critic at New England art schools.

Students in this class (click on a name to see an example of their work):

Orna Feldman           

Jill Kearney

Marty Davis

Bill Fitts

Lynn Kortenhaus