A Writing Workshop For Nurturing Writers

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

The new year often brings with it a need to deeply replenish our stores, to crack open the surface of the winter-frozen lake of self, and peer in our at our watery reflection.

Who is in there this year? What ideas, shifts, transformations, and creations await birth?

A brand new SIX-MONTH writing workshop (one class per month) — WHAT NURTURES US AS WRITERS — is tapping into that creativity and curiosity by pulling back the proverbial curtains. I chatted with the workshop guides Andi Talarico (AT) and Jenny Hill (JH) about the class, writing, inspiration, and the beauty of feeling alive again through unknowing, play, and magic. (And for anyone interested in their astrological big three, scroll down!).

The workshop runs Jan 23-June, and each session is 2 hours. It’s $150.00 for the whole workshop. Register now.

What inspired you to create this workshop? From what place, as a writer or creator, did this idea emerge?

Workshop co-guide Andi Talarico

AT: Jenny approached me with the idea of running a workshop series. We both come from a background of hosting reading series, attending and teaching workshops, writing groups, of being community-based writers, really. We've both owned and operated indie bookstores in the past that we used as dedicated spaces for writers and artists to make and show their work.

The Coronavirus has taken so much from us, including, I think, a true sense of community. I know when Jenny approached me with her ideas for the workshop it was with the idea of growing something together, hence the longer form 6-month workshop series, long enough to grow and learn and change and perhaps even write or polish a manuscript. Writing is a solitary endeavor for the most part, but this year has been about keeping us apart. The workshop series is hopefully a way for writers to feel re-engaged and part of something larger.

JH: A desire to collaborate with the collective, imaginative world, and to share some of the experiences that have helped shaped my writing with others. I see it as an esteemed responsibility to share what I've learned. Otherwise, I'm hoarding all the good stuff for myself, and not honoring the mentors who gave of themselves so generously. I'm a circus artist, poet, playwright, arts educator, and have had many incredible teachers in my lifetime. I'm a very fortunate human, who has had opportunities to share, and to learn.

Co-creating a workshop with Andi was something I knew would make me feel alive, and there's hope in that spark of co-creation lighting fires in others. I've known her for 22 years (gasp!). She's a metaphoric reader of the world and a person of deep vision. Even at 17 her poems intimidated me. I remember thinking, "Who IS this kid? How did she get this voice? Where did she come from?" Who wouldn't want to work with someone like that?

What are some of the things (poems, approaches, personal goals and motivations, the spiritual or emotional) that inspire each of you most as poets and writers, collaborators and workshop guides?

AT: One of the biggest lessons that I've taken away from this past year is to honor my body, by being present in it, by using it to exercise, walk, do yoga, stretch, rest, all of it. As a writer, I have a habit of shutting off communication from my body so I can focus on capturing the words rattling around in my skull, but you need all systems working in order to create, or at least I do. Poets are pleasure-lovers, sensualists, ooh- and aah'ers. So part of what we're doing in these classes is to evoke the sensation that makes us feel alive again; a squeeze of lemon, a breathing exercise—they're all working toward the same place, which for me, I like to call a small or gentle epiphany. Part of the work here is to seek that.

Workshop co-guide Jenny Hill

JH: Hearing and honoring the stories of others, dream logic, appreciation for minutiae, a sense of curiosity of path in creation, the interconnectedness of life, being changed by words, movement and how the body is a voice, the hope that exists inside you when you watch a snail, all the people who created before me and inspired me to create, the deep map of human emotion, play, play, and more play until you forget who you are and there is just the moment. Questions. Lots of questions. The place of not knowing.

How can participants come into the workshop space with little writing experience? And what about poets with experience (who may be stuck or working through new ideas or shifts?)

AT: You can come to this space with a project that you're trying to work through or you can come to this space new to writing and looking for ideas to get started. We'll all be doing the same work of writing. The exercises we'll be practicing are generative and open as we're hoping to create a space of trust and sharing.

JH: In each session we play, which can release inhibitions a person might have about having little writing experience. I can say from my place of a beginner in many areas in life that it is a delicious mindset to be in, because it is a very open place. The field is vast, the sky is open (not a cloud in sight!), and what's that on the horizon? Ah, look! Possibility. Woo hoo! Let's run toward it!

I think the same idea is true for those who have experience with writing, and are working through new ideas, finding themselves in a transitional phase with their writing, or just feeling stuck. The "le jeu" in the workshop sessions is there to shake us up, and make us see things from a fresh perspective. And to laugh! Goodness, we take ourselves way too seriously.

With the new year (and all of the change) ahead of us, why is this a great time to take this workshop?

AT: I know I needed a creative reset after 2020. Maybe some of you do, too. It's a new year, and now, a new era of American history to step into, and it's one of progress, compassion, and building back. You saw Amanda Gorman at the inauguration, right? The best speaker of the day, hands down. The speeches were excellent and important, don't get me wrong, but the speaker that stayed with you was Amanda. Her work moved people and THAT'S what poetry has the power to do. There are moments in our life so profound, so big, that they defy regular speech - they need something more potent, distilled, powerful: poetry.

JH: It's a good time to add some beauty to the world, to meet new people, and to share your ideas, hopes, dreams, visions. The light is early in the day, and sticking around later and later, and that is an opening. The curtain is lifting! It's your stage, and there's your cue. Get out there. You have something to say that is worthwhile and others need to hear it.

What are your favorite poems, books, or stories (oral or written or folkloric) that inspire YOU?

AT: Maggie Nelson, Ocean Vuong, Anne Carson, Dorianna Laux, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Danez Smith, Diane Ackerman, Morgan Parker, Layli Long Soldier, Ilya Kaminsky, Kahlil GIbran, Rebecca Solnit, Frank O'Hara, to name a few. Folk tales, magical realism, mysticism, tarot. I love when poets write essays, that might be my favorite genre in existence, haha. Who else but a poet's description could do?

JH: Ack! So many, and always changing, but currently and off the top of my morning head are: In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions, Serious Play by Louise Peacock, Twyla Tharp: The Creative Habit, The Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, A Book of Luminous Things, 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri, the music of Yann Tiersen, Little Red Riding Hood, Thurber, EB White, William Steig's The Lonely Ones, all of the dreams I have while sleeping, Talking to my Body by Anna Swir, and all of the little typewriter visual poems my grandfather created. I think he instilled the idea in me that letters are malleable, machines are meant for tinkering, and the value of "little" entertainments.

Bonus: Tell us about your big three (Sun, Moon, Rising sign)! How does astrology play into your creative/writing life?

AT: I'm a very emotional mix, with my Cancer Sun, Pisces Moon, and Sagittarius Rising placements. Cancer and Pisces are water signs, two of the most sensitive in the zodiac, known for intuitive and empathetic skills, while Sag is the fiery philosopher, life student, and explorer. Each one of those aspects helps feed my writing life, the Big Feelings as well as the constant need to keep learning. I like to think that poets need to be both archeologists and astronaut, trafficking in the past as well as the future.

JH: Sun in Aries, Rising Gemini, Moon in Leo. I wake up every morning, write, move, then ask myself over and over again throughout the day, "Who am I?" "What can I do?"

REGISTER HERE.

For the Love of “Umph”: A Review of 'Affect' by Charlene Elsby

BY LAUREN MALLETT

Erin, Ontario: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020. 147 pages. $18.95. Order here.

A couple days ago I was in a Zoom after party celebrating the round-robin solo performances of three musician pals.

The conversation lulled at one point and another participant, a stranger to me, said, “I don’t know a thing about music. I don’t know where I’d start.”

 “That’s the best place to be,” the most generous among us (not I) jumped in. “You know what sounds good to you, and that’s all you really need.”

In the parallel Zoomosphere of contemporary fiction, Canadian and philosophy scholar Charlene Elsby is not that stranger.

Elsby wasn’t rooting around for the plot slices and word cornucopias that simply looked, felt, or sounded best when she wrote Affect.

For one, Affect is her second rodeo. Hexis, her debut published in February 2020 by Clash Books, is Gone Girl meets Groundhog Day meets Nymphomaniac. The resulting concoction is spellbinding and disturbing as hell.

If Hexis is a cold-blooded, sadist verspertine, then Affect is a mammalian rom com attended by corpses and epistemological flights of worry.

Pick the medicine for what ails you.

Should you choose the latter, you are in for an endearing roman à clef in which the weirdo unnamed narrator, a philosophy graduate student, stalks and then pairs up with the just-as-weird Logan.

“‘It’s hard to want anything in this garbage existence,’” she comments to him early on. Such truth serum is heightened by her imagined bleedings-to-death and an epic bonfire.

The protagonist calls Logan “the best accident”, a cliché which is earned by her continual, existential qualification:

It might be true that anyone you come to know is magical. That might be the nature of the human. It’s hard to imagine that all of the others of them go on leading full inner and outer lives. In my experience, only I do. In my experience, I’m the one who experiences. This is why it’s so enamouring to learn that someone else does too.

Weirdos unite en amour! And soon thereafter hit and run from maybe corpses.

The pair’s discursive sparring is the first-and-foremost treat of the book. I would happily read a hundred more pages of their dialogue alone. They poke fun at one another, challenge each other’s foibles, and display care when it counts. Like when it’s time to escape a zombie bar takeover. After being separated at said bar, the two reunite:

‘Are you ready to go?’ he asked me.

‘Yes, let’s go.’

‘I bought us some sandwiches.’

‘That was a great idea.’

‘I know,’ said Logan.

‘You should never go anywhere else again, except maybe for sandwiches,’ I told him.

‘Sounds good.’

Affect reminds readers who have found their person of the miracle that they exist.

“Umph” is the protagonist’s miraculous refrain to this end, and it slaps.

Those readers who do not have—or have no interest in—such a yes-I-get-you-and-love-you-for-you partnership will also find moments to treasure.

The few secondary characters aren’t nearly as interesting as the protagonist and Logan. When the pair runs into her ex, Nick, on the way to a coffee shop, the dialogue slackens with snippets like “‘You hurt me’” and “‘You found me after I’d been broken.”’ Womp womp.

In contrast, Affect’s narrator speaks and thinks with wit and discernment: “One of the most horrid things I have had to come to terms with is that every moment of my life is one that I have had to live through.” I dare write that Affect (in effect) holds a candle to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.

So why—hinted at by my ignorance-as-bliss anecdotal hook—do I anticipate some readers may overlook Affect?

Is it because Elsby is relatively new to the game and brings a cerebral approach distinct from the current trends of polyphony and nonlinearity? Yes.

Is it because the rom com is tired, and illustrating how Affect both cozies up to and bites its thumb at the genre feels reductive and moot? Probably.

Is it because this is the first review I’ve volunteered to write and actually written, and I feel like the ignoramus, nosing around for the grubby jewels that best preview this misfits’ love story? Most definitely. 

I cheered on the inside at the landing of “Logan and I have chosen to direct ourselves toward the same universe.” Weirdos unite!

I finished Affect emboldened to love harder my absolutely-right-for-me partner and stand taller in my scuzzy, floral rain boots.

Oh, and an honest-to-god Nick Cave sticker adorns one chapter opening. A jewel, indeed.

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Lauren Mallett’s (she/her/hers) poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Passages North, Fugue, RHINO, and other journals. She lives on Oregon’s north coast, on the traditional homelands of the Clatsop people. Find her at www.laurenmallett.com.