Participants will bring, to read aloud, 300-500 words about something that, for them, prompts a recognition/daydream/thought/action, etc. The writing can take any form but should be an effort to present/characterize/follow the lines of the thing that prompts.
Please also bring something related to what you’ve written for others to see and write about in the workshop. It should somehow present some aspect or singularity of the thing that prompted your writing; it might be an angle on it, or an iteration of it. Again, any form is good (a material object, an image, a song, a poem, a performance, etc) – whatever works in your composition.
Each person starts by showing his or her accompanying thing, prompting everyone to write about it for 7 minutes. Then s/he reads her own 300-500 words. Then we talk.
Refreshments will be provided.
Kathleen Stewart is an anthropologist teaching at the University of Texas, Austin. Her writing is a series of ethnographic experiments aimed at finding ways to approach the variegated and energetic poesis of ordinary things. Her books: A Space on The Side of the Road: Cultural Poesis in an “Other” America (Princeton), Ordinary Affects (Duke), Worlding (Duke), and, with Lauren Berlant, The Hundreds.
