writing workshops
Explorations in Ekphrasis
This weekly writing workshop meets in galleries and museums throughout the greater Portland, Maine area. Poet, curator and visual artist Katherine Ferrier leads writers of all abilities in short writing explorations, using the works of art as inspirational and thematic springboards. Each week we contemplate a new exhibit, simultaneously using the artwork to open doorways into writing, and inviting our writing to open surprising conversations about art. Each session will include time for contemplation, timed writing exercises and discussion. Participants will have the option of sharing their work at the end of each session. Open to writers of all genres and levels.
Drop-ins are welcome. E-mail for information on upcoming sessions.
KINETIC | POETIC | SOMATIC: Research for Writers & Movers
In this workshop, we expand our somatic vocabulary and our hone our ability to tend to what hovers just beyond the reach of our attention. Through gentle, guided movement research, we cultivate new kinds of logic and syntax, and experiment with applying what we find to our writing practice. We simultaneously use words to generate possibilities for moving, and invite our physical research to open unexplored pathways of possibility into language. Radical permission to move differently, delivers each writer/mover to the razor’s edge of familiar vs. unknown territory. We begin with the beginning: how do you investigate the vague sense; how do you pull on the first thread to unravel more raw material? How can you deepen poetic contact with your emerging material? How can you complexify, seek out other angles, lure yourself into new modes of working and organizing? Finally, how can you learn to trust your embodied experience of a thing? No formal dance training is necessary, just a willingness to court the unfamiliar, set oneself on edge, and open wide the somatic windows of attention.