The Performative Word: A Writers Workshop

Texts are tools, extending the capacity to transmit complex, creative thoughts from one human being to another. Whether performed before a live audience or lifted off the page in a private act of reading, no text truly exists until it has blossomed in the recipient’s mind, the author’s ideas mated with our ideas, the intimate faculties of our being evoked to respond. What can a dialogue between literature and the performing arts teach us about the dynamics of representation and the event of the text? How does the spoken word put gesture into voice or theater wed action with emotion, and how can we as writers in any genre achieve such dimensionality and presence on the page?  This workshop will explore the life of words, the fact of the body, and their subtle intersections.  We will read and explore on both sides of the equation, theory and practice, performance and literature, but mostly we will write, accumulating a portfolio of work.  Students will participate in weekly peer review. Revision is expected. This is a workshop that will teach all writers to write persuasively and evocatively. Bring your willingness and curiosity.