Generating, Framing, and Materializing: Spacial and Poetic Inquiry

This workshop explores methods and themes of the open question and the resonate heart. Toward this purpose, we will be Stilling (locating ourselves in movement and stillness practice), Generating (sensory awareness and writing exercises), Framing (forming our writing in relation to frameworks of genre and constraints), and Materializing (working with materials to create book objects as expressions of our writing).

Generating: Writing

Elizabeth Guthrie will be working with creative exercises that her former workshop co-leader and late mentor/practitioner, Simone Ellis had developed over thirty years of teaching, beginning at Naropa University back in the early years of its existence. These exercises are aimed at activating and exercising that place between the conscious mind and the non-conscious mind, in order to be better able to generate writing material from our vast landscape of present experience, sensual input and memory. Her exercises include automatic writing as introduced by Andre Breton and the Surrealists and William Burroughs’s non-conscious and cut-up techniques.

Framing: Writing

Elizabeth Guthrie will be contextualizing and framing our generated text in a gesture toward form with an appreciation for the dialogue amongst the various genres and forms in our landscape and in the spirit of work of such artists as those coming out of the New York and San Francisco schools of poetry.

Materializing: Bookmaking

Elizabeth Guthrie will lead a book-making session in which participants can create book forms from their writing from the previous session. Using a combination of freely available digital resources and manual techniques, we will workshop and experiment with different forms before creating a limited edition artist book that captures writing from the workshop.