Writing Workshop

An update from our first Writing Workshop with new teacher, Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, April 17, plus some of the output published below In his first class under the official title of Stone Soup Creative Writing Instructor, Conner Bassett “called an audible,” and delivered a scintillating lecture on the use of “and” in literature as well as visual art. As he reminded us, although this was our first official workshop together, all of us, students and staff alike, are in the midst of our writing journeys, making this Writing Workshop less of a beginning, and more of an “and.” Over the course of the workshop, we learned about the uniquely conjoining, relational, and aggregational nature of the swiss army knife contraction, noting specifically its different uses within the titles Crime and Punishment and Being and Nothingness. We also looked at Marcel Duchamp’s conversion of a urinal into a “fountain” in his famous museum exhibition, noticing how this subversion of meaning connoted the effect of the word “and.” Moving through the expression of “and” in works by Magritte, Warhol, the general nature of Islamic art, and in the effect of the comic panel, we read an excerpt from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses in order to see the “speed” of and. Finally, we considered “and’s” ability to transcend time and conjoin the present with the past in Ezra Pound’s poetic masterwork The Cantos, and Dylan Thomas’ poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” And, of course, at the end of the workshop we wrote! The Challenge: In 30 minutes, write one of three types of pieces; one, write a story or poem where you replace every period with the word “and”; two, write a story or poem that begins “in the middle,” beginning with the word “and”; or, three, start a new story or poem at the end of an old one, beginning with the word “and.” The Participants: Emma, Harine, Georgia, Helen, Aditi, Olivia, Simran, Liam, Svitra, Noa, Anya, Audrey, Isolde, Alice, Samantha, Maddy, Sena, Sasha, Sinan, Emizzi, Jackson, Sophia. Anya Geist, 14Worcester, MA The House That Didn’t Fit In Anya Geist, 14 And the whole house seemed to not quite fit in, always a bit out-of-place. The floors were old and scuffed but regal nevertheless, so whenever I saw them I was reminded of the days when a creaky old house with rusty nails leaching through the peeling white paint was fresh and new, not a relic of a bygone era by the side of a road where motorcycles revved their engines late into the night. The windows, too, gave off this odd sense, with their dust-caked panes and sagging sashes and musty curtains. Not so much windows they were, as rippled, dirty pieces of glass shoved into the wall. And there was one window I recalled, in the living room above the stiff old couch with a stained glass drawing, again so hopelessly out of place—both out of place in this out-of-time mass of a house and out of place at the junction of two rural New Hampshire highways—where the sun would stream in, alighting the whole place, the rugs, the armchairs, the old wedding photos decaying on side tables in little ornate frames with a glow that perhaps belonged more in a cathedral; not, like I said, at a rural highway junction, nor in a house with a tiny first-floor bathroom painted with peeling wallpaper and smothered by this old, rundown smell, maybe which had something to do with the horrible squeaks that came out of the faucets—two faucets, one hot, one cold; that’s how old it was!—and washed your hands with slimy soap. Yes, even the soap didn’t fit in—or maybe it did, since it was all weird and felt gross on your hands when you thrust them under the frigid iron-filled water—but it didn’t really fit with the whole modern world; it didn’t leave you feeling clean. And then up the stairs—the stairs were steep, sharp, and one could imagine them in an old colonial town, and I do believe the house was from the 1800s—you would find the bedrooms. The bedrooms above the kitchen with the terribly old stove that I don’t believe could be used anymore and instead took up space and held different jars of jam which I always thought could be sold at the local farmer’s market, and we’d use the jam to make sandwiches with bread from that same farmer’s market on that little fold-out table that always seemed as if it might fall apart. At any rate, the bedrooms were stuffed with pillows and such because no one ever really used them except for the master bedroom, stuffed with Cabbage Patch dolls and little plastic toys from when we were toddlers—how out of place, 21st century manufacturing was in this house! Truly most things were out of place. This house, old and falling apart only ten feet from the highway—quite literally ten feet—and so near to that corner store which also was a gas station, and doesn’t even have heating for the winter. But then—when I walked around the side of the house—it didn’t even have a back door, except in the basement, and I daren’t go down to the basement—I saw the backyard, which was unkempt and wild  and disturbed by those pesky motorcycles screeching down the road at ten at night, and maybe the house wasn’t so out of place after all. Emma Hoff, 9Bronx, NY Sensibility Emma Hoff, 9 And when she was picked, she had long hair. Long, flowing hair, dark as the night sky, which never seemed to be blue, and dark as the colors of the witches cloaks, which were always pulled so tightly around themselves, like how tight the buns on top of their heads were. We had a visit from the most important witches recently, they were here to choose. I had always been a promising child. “Lots of potential, just needs to speak up more.”