Workshop: Practices of Hope: From Solarpunk to Hybrid Making
Wednesdays, 7pm–9.30pm EST: May 13, 20, and 27, 2020
We, the editors of About Place’s Practices of Hope special issue, wish to extend the issue’s interest in hybrid, collaborative, and communal writing and making into a pedagogy of being creatively engaged with one another. Join us on Zoom to read or view a few of the issue’s pieces, discuss them, and then spend time together to respond to prompts.
Structure:
Each day, we’ll discuss pieces from Practices of Hope. We will follow that with 1.5-2 hours of generative writing: we will give an impetus related to our reading, coming together again after each 20 minute freewrite for a quick check-in. We’ll end the session with a further prompt for writing and/or making (engaging in hybrid art-movement-writing forms) that you can take away to work on later. On the third day, we’ll replace the generative writing time with a reading night: everybody reads/shows work from their work-in-progress created during the workshop. There is no formal written feedback given: this is a generative class.
Costs: We ask for a donation of $30-$60 dollars. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Profits go to the Black Earth Institute. To register, please send an email to both deblee@wsu.edu and petra@umich.edu. We will then send you a paypal link for your donation. The class will be capped at 18.
Experience Level: This class is open to people who enjoy working independently with prompts. Look around the special issue before we meet: https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/practices-of-hope/
Instructors:
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, a Professor at the University of Michigan and an advisor on Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts. She leads The Olimpias, an international performance research collective. Her award-winnig academic books engage disability performance; medicine and contemporary arts; somatics and writing; and community performance. She is also the author of a dark fantasy collection, Ice Bar (2018). Her most recent poetry collection is the ecosomatic Gut Botany (2020). Her work has appeared in journals like Ecotone, PANK, P-Queue, Shoreline of Infinity, PodCastle, Anomaly, Adrienne, Beauty is a Verb, and more. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space.
https://petrakuppersfiction.wordpress.com/
DJ Lee holds a MFA in creative nonfiction and a PhD in 19th-century literature. She is Regents Professor of English at Washington State University, where she teaches creative writing and literature. Her creative work includes over thirty non-fiction pieces in magazines and anthologies and her hybrid memoir Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots (Oregon State Univ Press, 2020). She has also written or edited seven books on the environment, British poetry, travel literature, and oral history, most recently The Land Speaks (Oxford University Press, 2017). She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, an Idaho Humanities Grant, the Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and the Arctic Circle Artist Residency. She has also attended workshops as an instructor or participant at The Johns Hopkins University Conference on Craft and Science Writing, Hedgebrook, and the Women’s Studio Workshop.
http://www.debbiejlee.com