When: Sunday, January 12, 2020, 4:00pm-6:30pm
Where: Iowa Writers' House, 332 East Davenport St
Cost: $75
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
Stardust Sessions are workshops for anyone who believes that writing is a way to light up the magic in the mundane. Through an eclectic array of methods—guided meditations, visionary poetry, chance operations, Fluxus instructions, divination, spells, and more—you will tap into your ability to imagine new possibilities in writing and life. By the end of the sessions, your relationship with your writing practice will become both more profound and more playful; you’ll feel supported by ritual and community; and you’ll know how to tap into your intuition through the imagery found in tarot, literary and spiritual writings, and your own visions.
The Art & Magic of Feedback (Jan)
In the final Stardust Session, participants will share a short piece of writing related to the themes of the series: ritual, the underworld, the heroine's journey, divination, magic, and more. Upon registration, participants will be sent writing prompts from the instructor, to be used as starting points of inspiration if desired. New participants are welcome to join this session.
Rather than focusing on critique or how to "fix" pieces of writing, we will treat the act of giving feedback as an art form in itself. Something magical happens when we open up our writing to the work of the group mind. We’ll practice various methods of offering feedback (reflection, description, association, expansive praise, inquiry) and participants will be able to choose the type of feedback they receive, a sense of agency that is especially important when sharing work in its early, exploratory stages.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press) and Empire Wasted (Bloof Books). Black Lawrence Press will publish Ready for the World, a poetic spellbook for the digital age, in early 2020. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in The American Poetry Review, Fence, Denver Quarterly, and The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing.
As an editor, Becca cofounded the small press Switchback Books and is currently coediting, with Arielle Greenberg, the multimedia poetry anthology Electric Gurlesque. As a scholar, she researches women’s experimental writing practices at the intersection of life, art, and activism.
She holds degrees from the University of Southern California (BA), Columbia College Chicago (MFA), and Rutgers University (PhD), and is the Robert P. Dana Director of the Center for the Literary Arts at Cornell College. Born and raised in Milwaukee, she currently lives in Iowa City.
INSTRUCTOR INSPIRATION STATEMENT
Although I originally went off to college to study screenwriting in LA, hold a scholarly PhD in literature, and have written and published stories and essays, I am a poet at heart. This means that I bring an attention to language, form, and experimentation to writing in any genre. I love the way close reading can work like dream interpretation, helping a writer see what she didn’t know she knew. I love giving permission: my dissertation was titled “Include Everything,” an artistic stance that banishes the censor and instead urges us to write the true content of our lives. I love helping other writers discover the formal containers that this fluid content could most organically be poured into.
Lately my teaching has begun to question why certain types of knowledge are included in or excluded from different contexts. It’s a common truism among creative writing teachers, for example, that “writing workshops aren’t group therapy,” whereas many students enroll in workshops for a chance to reflect on their lives as much as they arrive eager to learn craft. I see these as false dualisms: what counts as “life” or “writing” is not so easily separated, and I’m more interested in the fuzzy gray areas from which new ways of living and writing spring.
REGISTER FOR WORKSHOP
All course information is sent to participants upon registering, including confirmation of workshop times, location, and materials.