Check out what’s in store for 2020 and contact me with any questions about a class!
Past Workshops
February
Subject/Object Subversion, a generative all-genre workshop at Goddard College
When: Monday, February 17
Where: Goddard College, Port Townsend, WA
Have you ever written a character based off of an external observation? Maybe the character was inspired by a person you observed at a coffee shop; maybe they were someone you worked with closely for a year. Regardless, you made a decision to enshrine on paper what they looked like, what they sounded like, and what they intended to convey with each gesture and every act. Whether the resultant impressions were fantastical or true to life, invariably, you controlled the narrative as the subject and they were the object of your gaze.
In this workshop, we will look at humorous examples wherein the roles of observer and observed are reversed. Then, we will produce a short written exercise about an encounter between subject and object initially from the POV of the subject followed by the POV of the object. Students can bring in characters from their thesis work or craft new characters from scratch. The goal is to gain a different perspective by playfully exploring the relationship between empathy and imagination and discussing how one writer’s object might be another’s subject and vice versa.
Current Workshops
Contextualizing the Family Story, a creative non-fiction workshop series at Hugo House
When: May 5 to June 23, every Tuesday @ 5pm – 7pm. Eight-class series is $342 members / $380 non-members; need-based scholarships available through Hugo House. Register HERE.
Where: Hugo House (1634 11th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122) with potential for online classes via Zoom in compliance with current King County “social distancing” recommendations.
As Wendell Berry wrote, “The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?” In this class, we will discover how to connect your intimate experience to a broader social history by studying the works of Jesmyn Ward, Camille Dungy, Karen Tei Yamashita, Nick Flynn, and others. Together, we will identify and examine personal circumstances and cultural backgrounds (commonly described as the “accidents of birth”) in order to flesh out your individual story with self-selected social, historical, and fundamentally human context. By combining assigned research homework with in-class writing exercises, we will practice grounding subjective emotional truths in objective external circumstances in order to heighten our awareness of where we come from and who we are. Writers of all experience levels and at any stage of their project welcome.
Register HERE.
Agnotology is the study of ignorance, how it is produced and maintained, what is lost and forgotten, and most importantly, why. What drops—or is dropped—from the historical record? What has gone missing, and whose agenda do those gaps and holes serve? You could say that agnotology is the study of what isn’t.
Foreward to John Okada’s No No Boy, Ruth Ozeki 2014
