Opening Creative Writing Through a Social Justice Approach with Anya Achtenberg

    Saturday, March 3, 2018 at 10:00 AM until 6:00 PMUTC -05:00


    Sarah Lawrence College
    1 Mead Way
    Bronxville, NY 10708
    United States

    Instructor: Anya Achtenberg
    Length: 1 session, $320
    Saturday, March 3rd,  10:00 AM - 6:00 PM


    For writers at all levels of experience, across the genres, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction.

     

    In 8 transformative hours, you will be introduced to a reframing of the craft of creative writing across the genres, whether poetic or narrative. You will be offered tools that can expand and deepen your writing to enhance its power and beauty, while you simultaneously find ways into fuller expression of your urgent concerns in this politically charged and challenging world.

                    Throughout this day, each writer will find your own web of association expanded, increasing the creative terrain in which you move, and bringing greater context to your stories and characters, your poetry and your language. You will see how working with this enhanced associative ability, so crucial to the writing of striking poetry, also opens your story, whether fiction or nonfiction, as you find there is always a story next to the story you began with. As you learn to use the associative process for poems and stories that not only express but investigate, you will also find new ways to arrive at structure for your stories. Revealing the connections between things that seem not to be connected is a deeply political act that invigorates the poetic and fulfills powerful narrative. Reaching the invisible, the hidden cost, the hidden story; is a deeply creative act, therefore, that is at the heart of both good creative writing, and a vital political consciousness.

     

    The writing tools we will use at this Saturday intensive, include:

    Writing exercises to help dispense with “writer’s block”;

    Expansion of your web of association to arrive at potent language and hidden story;

    Microscopic truthfulness and its powerful applications;

    Simple approaches to write of events that feel too enormous/too painful to write through;

    How to rediscover and recontextualize language;

    Using juxtaposition to fully explore and develop story;

    Direct entry to material through a loaded word; and

    The tool of imaginative knowing.

     

    Come and experience this opening of your writing process and creativity, and learn how it links to the political challenges we face in our desire for a better world. Bring these tools home, along with many new writing explorations you’ve either begun during the day or can later work on and develop. Each participant is welcome to share some of this writing and receive useful feedback in the community we make.

     

    The workshop offers some of the material of my Creative Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World Workshop (the 1st part of a 3-part series).

    For full descriptions of the Re-Dream a Just World Workshop Series, please see:https://thedisobedientwriter.com/courses-and-workshops/writing-for-social-change-re-dream-a-just-world-workshops/

     

    Anya Achtenberg is an award-winning writer whose publications include the novel, Blue Earth; novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl; and poetry collections, The Stone of Language, and I Know What the Small Girl Knew. Her work has received prizes and distinctions from, among others, Southern Poetry Review; Another Chicago MagazineCoppola's Zoetrope: All-Story; New Letters; and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Recent poetry and prose has been published in Tupelo Quarterly; Malpais Review; Gargoyle; Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion; Hinchas de poesia, Poet Lore; Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art; and,in the anthology, How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse, an essay focused on mixed and out-of-category identity, in relation to the deconstruction and expansion of the instruction to “write from a sense of place”. History Artist, a novel Anya has almost completed,treats a mixed-race Cambodian woman living in Boston, born at the moment the U.S. bombing of Cambodia began, and the intersecting stories of those around her. Anya has just finished poetry chapbook, Advice to Travelers. Her nonfiction work includes articles on creative writing, and creative nonfiction on Cuba. (She organizes arts-focused and multicultural journeys to Cuba.)Anya teaches creative writing workshops around the U.S., and online around the world; conducts intensive critique groups in-person and online; and consults with writers individually. For more information, see her new website under construction, www.thedisobedientwriter.com, or her previous website, www.anyaachtenberg.com, both including short articles on craft.


    Writing Institute Registration Process:

    Step 1 - Registration Information: Complete this registration form in full.

    Step 2 - Payment: Once you click submit on this form, a new page will appear in your browser with a payment link. Click on the payment link, complete the required information, and submit your payment. 

     
    Payment is required for your registration to be confirmed. If we don’t receive your payment within 48 hours of submission of this form, your registration will automatically be cancelled. You will have to complete the form again if you wish to register for the class.

    Step 3 - Confirmation: Once we receive your payment, your registration will be finalized and confirmed with an email. Please keep this email for your records.  Details about room assignment, parking, and any other information relevant to the course will be emailed to registered students the week before classes begin.

    If you have questions about the registration process, please call us at 914-395-2205 or email writinginstitute@sarahlawrence.edu.

    Registration is no longer available because the event has been cancelled.