An update from the twenty-eighth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday February 19th, plus some of the output published below “We are still living under the reign of logic… but dreaming is not inferior to reality as real human experience.” -André Breton For this week’s workshop, Conner had us “let go of our logical brains” and imitate surrealists of the 20th century by writing “automatically.” According to the rules of automatic writing, one should write for a period of time without a plan, purpose, or end point in mind, one should write as rapidly as possible without intervening consciously to guide the writing, and one should avoid conscious thought. In order to get in the proper frame of mind to write in this manner, we looked at various paintings by surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí and action artists like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning, and read the automatic writing of pioneers like André Breton, Benjamin Peret, and Phillipe Soupault, including some excerpts of Breton and Soupault’s Les Champs magnétiques. Before we began our prompt, we were also supplied with the following word bank, for optional use: Island Frog Milk Mountain Leftovers Grandfather Sweater Feather Rooster Crystal Holy Fork The Challenge: Write automatically for 20 minutes, then spend ten minutes arranging your piece. The Participants: Emma, Sophia, Nova, Amelia, Ananya, Alice, Josh, Zar, Samantha, Ellie, Chelsea, Quinn, Penelope To watch the rest of the readings from this workshop, like Emma’s below, click here. Emma Hoff, 9(Bronx, NY) I Tell Bad Jokes Emma Hoff, 9 Watermelon, cantaloupe, manatee, old shawl, disappearing objects, gone now. Jokes on the water at school, screen on fire, full fire, keep going and run or ride yourself forward make it bad but good and everything looks like the letter F. Everything’s crooked but perfect just kidding it’s all sad and makes people collapse but who cares anyway? Fruit in a bowl, toss the cookies out of the “cookie jar.” I don’t use a cookie jar, fruit in a jar. Everybody, come and join the feast! The table is wide and spread for you, but you do not come. I will eat your favorite watermelon by myself I guess, and the meat will rot, because all the company I have are ghosts that plucked their feathers out on Ebay. I guess I had too many stressed birds for pets. Daisies unfold but was I talking about tulips? Why looks like a letter, feels like something else new, can it be new? Nose, head, I can’t draw. Is this all good, am I bad, am I ranting? I take piano lessons and everything eventually breaks and I will eventually grow up and be scared and responsible and do things, and then I will eventually die, so what’s the point of learning? This moment? Okay, I’ll keep this moment but I know they won’t inscribe it on my grave because it’s too long to explain and too much beauty is too beautiful for eyes to see, my own eyes are on fire. My finger is in a pencil sharpener because I couldn’t find a pencil and I didn’t want to write with a marker. Maybe I should write with a crayon or mow lawns with a glue stick? I should plan a vacation so I can become tiny, because then the light switch will be easier to use and I’ll be able to climb everything and actually be a mountaineer and I’ll get squished and know what it feels like to be an accordion, but I can’t play an accordion, so my hypothesis is that it won’t be like in the cartoons and I won’t make music. Hypothesis is a long word and an accordion is also long but I like the word hypothesis and I like accordions, sort of, though I don’t play them. If you jump on an accordion I bet you would spring right back up because that’s what an accordion is like, and if you don’t clean out the basement right now, I will get super mad and possibly kill you, but the correct thing to say would be angry, because mad would mean you’re crazy, but I’m mad with anger at grammar, but I like grammar anyway, but I also like the word mad. Mad, mad, mad, say it louder! Turtles crawl slowly but the one my cousin made out of a paper plate is completely still. I think my cousin made it. Maybe I crafted it in my sleep? Ha ha, good one, good joke, why is no one else laughing? I don’t think I should go onstage and be a comedian because all my jokes suck and I’ll be the only one dying of laughter and everyone will storm out because they think I’m annoying. Pinwheels and flowers are similar, except one is plastic and one is paper, because I see a flower right now, and it’s paper. Why are you smiling? Why aren’t you smiling? Why is your mouth so tight and grim? It’s all wrong and so is the writing, so why do I keep painting? I draw people wearing crowns, but then I put Xs through the crowns and I laugh and I give them red hair because I like red hair. I like carrots, too, but the bunnies will eat all my carrots before I can and I don’t really like carrots. Are you sure you don’t want to eat with me? It’s nighttime, I should go to bed. I don’t want to sleep and I need to get this olive out of the jar and unstick my cat from the cannon and get the stain from the juice of the orange off the couch, the table, my clothes, and my chin. Okay, but really, there’s nothing to see, except orange and red! I see pink, blue, and so many different shades of green, too, but don’t tell. It all makes me roll my eyes and I see
Writing Workshop
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #27: Parables & Paradoxes
An update from the twenty-seventh Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday February 12, plus some of the output published below This week, Conner chose to focus on the miniature literature of Daniil Kharms and Franz Kafka in the form of parables and paradoxes. The entirety of the workshop was spent on the writing of Kharms and Kafka, beginning with Kharms, a Soviet era Russian avant-gardist and absurdist poet, writer, and dramatist. We began by reading “Man with Red Hair,” in which a red-headed man is introduced and subsequently stripped down to non-existence body part by body part until the speaker finally says “So it is probably best not to talk about him anymore.” This piece set the tone for what the rest of these parables and paradoxes would do: namely, make us laugh! We also read “A Story,” “The Old Woman,” and “7 or 8,” all by Kharms. From Kafka, we read “A Little Fable,” “Give it Up!,” and “The Departure.” The Participants: Nova, Amelia, Emma, Josh, Lina, Ellie, Zar, Quinn, Alice, Chelsea The Challenge: Write a parable or paradox à la Kharms or Kafka. To watch the rest of the readings from this workshop, like Zar’s below, click here. Zar, 11
Writing Workshop #58: Sense of Place
An update from our fifty-eighth Writing Workshop A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, February 12th, plus some of the output published below William started off the workshop by having a journal reading from Ananya. Then, he invited participants to read passages from books they were reading that captured a sense of place. Peri and Agatha both read passages from books they were currently reading. William continued with a review of another topic he’s covered in Writing Workshop: Ekphrasis. He emphasized that using sensory details and thinking about how different characters might react to an environment. We looked at examples from Jack London’s Call of the Wild and Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Then the writers did a short exercise where they wrote for 5 minutes where they could either write a neutral description of a place or an emotionally charged perspective through the eyes of a character. The Challenge: Describe a place through the eyes of a character, with all the bias and emotion that they might have. The Participants: Agatha, Sophie, Peri, Kate, Liam, Anya, Ananya, Lauren, Lena, Rachael, Alexandra, Yueling, Iago, Elbert Yueling Qian, 9Chicago, IL The Barn Yueling Qian, 10 I look at the old barn. It is dark red as if it was painted like that to make me feel worse. The wet mud sticked to the bottom of my shoe. I could hear the ugly squelching sound of it. The cows mooed furiously. I look at the tall yellow crops. It looked like they all hate each other, and they wanted to outgrow each other. The horses kicked their hind legs staining the perfectly white fence. All the delicious yellow corn has fell on to the gross wet mud. The ugly rotten corn remained standing. The sunflowers drooped like the sun meant nothing anymore. In fact, the sun didn’t mean a thing anymore. Peri Gordon, 11Sherman Oaks, CA The Hill Peri Gordon, 12 Twenty-two hills. We had scouted twenty-two hills, and not one was right for the film. Too tall, too short, too large, too small…why bother with a twenty-third? We would never find the perfect one. The overgrown shrubs of Hill Twenty-Three crowded around us, blocking our way. The dull green of their leaves resembled a watery, disgusting stew, which, suddenly, I could practically taste. The clouds above obscured the sky in long, pale streaks, as if a child had smeared the atmosphere with white paint. In the feeble light, it could be seen that the hill was pockmarked with stones covered in moss—or was it mold?—and the grass stuck up like thousands of blades waiting for someone with bare feet to come along. A rancid smell wound its way down from a looming, moldy chunk of rock to the threatening grass, worked its way around a few trees that shielded the hill, and wafted into my nostrils, at which point images of sewers flashed through my mind. I was sure I could feel the moist, mushy ground beneath my feet beginning to cave in under the weight of my body, and I jumped back in alarm, smashing my legs into a bush woven with thorns. As I tried to recover, the clouds suddenly parted, making way for devilish heat that practically set my back on fire. I ran down the side of the hill, attempting to get away from parts of nature I could never escape, my shoes slipping off and allowing the sharp grass to torment my feet, doomed to run to yet another hill, all for a movie that would never be made.
