WRITING THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL taught by Dawn Raffel

Are you writing the story only you can write? Are you telling it in the way only you can tell? Do you have the courage to keep going?

This workshop intensive will help students bring their full human attention to the practices of composition and editing while also surfacing deeper layers of creative consciousness through yoga and meditation. The course will take an immersive and physical approach to craft, encouraging writers to discover more radically subjective ways of expressing themselves on the page while also remaining more lucidly and feelingly present in their everyday lives.

This is not about flowing and then free-writing or journaling.; it’s about engaging both deep interiority and analytic skills. Precision of sentence-making and composition put those insights on the page, transferring the feeling to the reader rather than telling the reader what to feel.

Organizations: Roots & Rivers Program; Positive Tails

THE PRACTICAL WRITER taught by Catherine Lacey

The Practical Writer is an eight-week seminar and writing workshop centered around a series of obstacles.

At its core, writing is the process of confronting various challenges. The first and constant challenge is this: how does a person translate a feeling—the sense of a story— into something legible made of language and narrative and sound?

In the course of trying to solve that first problem, other problems arise. There is the problem of beginnings, and of endings, and the horizonless problem of the middle. There is the challenge of maintaining spontaneity in a sentence that may have been worked over many times. There is the problem of dialogue, of exposition, of imagery, of pacing. There is the question of conveying large emotions—grief, love, depression, elation, frenzy. There is the endless problem of how we spend our time when we are not writing and how that spent time will or won’t leak back into our work. 

Each week we will focus on one or a few of these challenges. Each week we will both read works that confront this challenge, as well as create work of our own. In class, we will discuss the readings and share our writing aloud. Together we will investigate the practicalities, impracticalities, concerns, and rituals that may influence, galvanize or otherwise challenge a writer.

We will read book excerpts and short stories from writers that may include but are not limited to Yukiko Motoya, Jean Rhys, John Edgar Wideman, James Baldwin,  David Markson, Derek Parfit, Jacques Lecoq, John Berger, Chinelo Okparanta, Virginia Woolf, Diane Cook, Ken Sparling, Marguerite Youcenar, Sara Manguso, Lydia Davis, Will Eno, Grace Paley, and Robert Walser.

Organization: JASA

EIGHT PRISON-BREAKS (BEYOND TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE) taught by David Shields

This course will investigate the topics of brevity, journal, collage, remix, appropriation, photo, film, and collaboration through a combination of lectures, handouts, and class discussions, exploring the myriad ways in which you might deploy similar strategies in your own work.

Organization: Brennan Center for Justice

THE DREAM SONGS taught by Joe Wenderoth

As poetry, The Dream Songs is a famous book.

It was actually two books—the first in 1964 was called 77 Dream Songs, then in 1968 a few hundred more uh dem’ Songs were published in a book called His Dream, His Toy, His Rest. Mostly today the two books are added together to make one and are sold as The Dream Songs. I bought a copy of 77 Dream Songs recently, and was amazed to find that the original cover takes the word DREAM and pulls up the R and the A. Like so:

   R   A

D   E   M

S O N G S

Dem’ songs. 

This is a clear reference, at the level of the non-aristocratic white American man, to “black” speech, a la the minstrel show. The term “dream song” is not a reference to minstrelsy; it was a term that was used mainly by slaves, and descendants of slaves. Thus, while whites (in blackface) were singing “dem songs” (a rollicking comedy) on stage, actually enslaved blacks were using the term “dream song” to refer to a prophetic dream, a foreboding of tragic death, which was their usual fate, naturally, given their enslavement. In the 1960s the term would have been known mostly amongst older and/or more rural black populations. Not exactly the most likely demographic to come into possession of Berryman’s book. White, mainly academic readers were drawn to The Dream Songs, but have always feared their being drawn to it—feared that it might evidence pleasures attached to racism. Don’t enjoy this… is the constant reminder one has to carry along. We have to remember, too, that the privilege of simply steering clear of “race” talk (talk of “race”) was very firmly in place in the 60’s & 70’s. Indeed, the threat to that privilege has been slow to grow—didn’t become really conspicuous until just now. That’s how the scant amount of criticism regarding The Dream Songs seems to me: an amazing feat of steering clear of all points that matter more than a little bit. The criticism I have found is paralyzed by fear of the racial questions implicit in the poems, and so it has downplayed the role of minstrelsy. To come at The Dream Songs without understanding their profound foundation in minstrelsy is like telling of the history of slavery without mention of cruelty.

It’s a bizarre situation—a book that is so well known, so beloved (beloved?) & respected (respected?), and so universally misunderstood. 

I’ve had a number of people tell me that one should not teach The Dream Songs anymore—joking, half the time, but whether joking or not, the idea is routinely raised. As though The Dream Songs are what we like to call racially insensitive. If there is one thing that The Dream Songs most certainly are, it is racially sensitive. If we want to locate racial insensitivity, we need to look on the other side of the dream-song-and-reader experience; we need to look, that is, into the mind-set of the liberal white world, particularly academia—Berryman’s audience. His audience, which immediately heaped praise and award on the book as one of the most significant achievements of its generation, was subsequently forced to back away from this judgment for several reasons. First, no one really understood what the book was, how it worked—its structure and its several interdependent key occupations. Second, the history of racial insensitivity in America was more & more exposed as the 70’s & 80’s achieved some degree of desegregation; white liberals, especially academics, were gradually forced to admit the history of racism into the realm of what gets talked about. It was never enough to allow for much grasp of The Dream Songs' accomplishment—and it was sort of too late, as the Dream Songs were from decades before, and had already been abandoned (particularly after Berryman’s death). 

The Dream Songs have a main character named Henry. Henry is asleep, and he has dreams. His dreams are all of a minstrel show stage. Does he choose this setting? Does one choose where one is in one’s dreams? I don’t think so. Especially in Berryman’s case, wherein dreams are actually a recurring set of nightmares, recurring deaths. The first and foremost of these deaths is the death of his biological father by way of suicide—shotgun, early morning, outside in the yard by the boy’s window. But this death echoes out into other deaths:

The death of God The Father by way of Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche…

The death of the potential implicit in America by way of continuing racism, capitalism, imperialism, the military industrial complex…

The death of the beautiful sexual potentials implicit in Song Of Myself by way of decent white homophobic “religious” commitment to technological progress, particularly in the realm of world-ending weaponry…etc.

Berryman does not choose these deaths. 

These deaths resonate out together because, from the point of view of the sleeping Henry, they all happened together while he was awake, i.e., they are all real: they can be tracked as non-dreamt histories. What is remarkable about the dream songs is the angle of reflection forcing the content into view: the minstrel show; the obscene foundation of American entertainment—the first American genre of entertainment. Its existence is buried now—people know of the minstrel show, but usually they don’t really know very much about the details, and have little sense of how vast its history is, and how absolutely essential in the formation of America. While there are no more minstrel shows per se, the elements of the minstrel show have nevertheless gotten through into our post-minstrel-show world—all of the stereotypes, much of the structure, and much of the spirit.  The minstrel show was hugely important to the conjuring of blackness, its practical caricatures, and its fairy tale context (the happy plantation). That which is hugely important to the conjuring of blackness is hugely important to the conjuring of whiteness. Put another way, the conjuring of blackness is the conjuring of whiteness.  

There's a lot to get to, but the nice thing is that The Dream Songs is a vibrant loud and shiny sort of show—a belting out of the English language as enthralling as it is harrowing.

Organization: Mr. Bones & Co.