THE JOY (AND ETHICS) OF NOT WRITING

Cost: $50 (+materials) n.b. this is listed incorrectly as $75 in the catalogue

Instructor: Mark Truscott

Duration: June 12th 2010, 12 – 4 pm

Capacity: 8 students

As writers we tend to focus relentlessly on writing, and rarely on not writing. This may be a mistake. This workshop will consider the negative terms implied by customary thinking about our vocation and will feature useful exercises designed to block creativity. Readings (of the likes of M. M. Bakhtin, Mary Carruthers, Simon Cutts, Ezra Jack Keats, Steve McCaffery, and Aram Saroyan) will illuminate the importance of not reading. If time permits, there will be discussion of strategies for avoiding publication. Participants will come away less sure but perhaps more sane.

READINGS
Readings, to be completed prior to the workshop, will consist of careful selections from various texts, likely including the following:

Bakhtin, M. M. “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Cutts, Simon. Some Forms of Availability. New York: Granary Books, 2007.

Keats, Ezra Jack. The Snowy Day. New York: Viking, 1962.

McCaffery, Steve. Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001.

Saroyan, Aram. Complete Minimal Poems. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007.