The Free School for Writing

The Free School for Writing is conceived as a modular, collapsible, itinerant classroom where writers and anyone interested can learn together through literary talks, writing workshops, or more performative experiments with the format of the class. Special projects in partnership with community organizations also promote literacy and use writing to address local needs through interdisciplinary arts projects. All Free School classes offer a warm, welcoming environment where caregivers can bring babies or others in their care.

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For the kickoff of Cuentos visibles y cenas escondidas | Signs and Wonders and Hidden Dinners, we (with some unexpected help from the Executive Director of YMCA Achievers) transformed a fluorescent-lighted classroom in the Egleston Square YMCA Achievers building into your favorite tía’s lamp-lit, gauze-curtained living room. 

Luis Cotto and I had sat down a couple of weeks earlier and made a short list of people to invite who had history with the neighborhood. The idea was to share with them plans for the Bodega Signs + Wonders project and invite people to share stories and ideas. I made invitations and visited each person to talk to them a bit about the project and invite them to dinner.

Many of them were busy with their families and small businesses and the holiday season. About half of those we invited came and stayed despite the rain and the weeknight and the undercooked rice. Names aren’t included here for now, just for privacy and permission’s sake, but in attendance was a neighbor who grew up in Egleston and caters healthy versions of Dominican food; a neighbor who works as a membership coordinator for the YMCA and lives upstairs from a corner bodega, where her husband works; her teenaged daughter; the owner of of Egleston’s Latino Beauty Salon; and a seriously longtime Egleston Square resident and former organizer of Boston’s Puerto Rican festival.

I fumbled the memory timeline activity I’d planned—a consequence of 3 hours of slightly panicky cooking and a towed car just before the event. Still, people shared generously and spontaneously, personal stories about work and life and loss and what JP was like in the 70s. One person talked about what it was like to reinvent herself after getting laid off from her job a month after September 11—8 months pregnant. A neighbor she’d just met, now retired, encouraged her to accept job promotions she was offered, remembering struggles from his own career.

We ate and talked some more. Frank Baez introduced himself to the group via recorded video from Peru, where he was part of a literary festival. We shared plans and ideas for the project and people asked a lot of questions. One neighbor was enthusiastic about an idea to have an Egleston Square/JP Memory Party Bus, insisting we needed a double-decker tour bus instead.

Everyone seems excited about what’s to come! Our next project event will be a writing workshop on Saturday, January 27, 6:30-7:45pm at the Egleston Square Branch Library. Stay tuned for details!

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BODEGA SIGNS + WONDERS

Cuentos visibles y cenas escondidas | Signs and Wonders and Hidden Dinners

Just over a year ago my little family and I moved to Boston, MA, where we were fortunate to make our home in Egleston Square, an area that spans the neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain and Roxbury. The happy news is that this has led to an exciting new project happening this year with generous support from NEFA’s Creative City Grant program. 

Community writing workshops through the Free School for Writing and dinner conversations with neighbors in Egleston Square, Egleston Square Main Streets and the Egleston Square Branch of the Boston Public Library will generate community stories, song lyrics, and neighborhood history. Dominican poet Frank Baez and I will write/assemble them as poems and very short stories in English and Spanish. These will be made into a series of text-based public art works in the aesthetics and vernacular of bodega signs, produced by a Boston sign maker and installed throughout the Washington and Columbus Avenue commercial district. The project celebrates and makes visible the neighborhood’s social and cultural heritage. Baez’s spoken word band El Hombrecito will visit from Dominican Republic in Spring/Summer 2016 for a workshop and mini-residency. 

More soon!

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The Free School for Writing: Single-Family, Duplex, Triple-Decker, Go! at Urbano Project through early May

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Disruptive Pattern Material at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens as part of An Evening of Futurism December 7, 2013 Michelle Weinberg and Denise Delgado collaborated to present Free School for Writing: Disruptive Pattern Material. Inspired by the invention and application of camouflage painting techniques to the war effort, a Free School class staged in a rustic dazzle bivouac setting on Vizcaya's grounds dealt with strategies in art and literature for deception, misdirection and "blowing smoke." Some topics covered by the speaker (Delgado) included the voice of the manifesto, rhetoric in futurist literature, and the language of propaganda and ideology in fiction. Weinberg's set, costume and propaganda design for the classroom derives from her interest in de-materializing solids via the use of pattern.

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At Melanie's beautiful talk last night.

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Links and handout materials for Poet as Bricoleur | Melanie Almeder

www.foundmagazine.com

www.foundpoetry.com

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But largely, c’mon — you and I both know — real live American poetry is absent from our public schools. The teaching of poetry languishes, and that region of youthful neurological terrain capable of being ignited and aria’d only by poetry is largely dark, unpopulated, and silent, like a classroom whose door is unopened, whose shades are drawn. This is more than a shame, for poetry is our common treasure-house, and we need its aliveness, its respect for the subconscious, its willingness to entertain ambiguity; we need its plaintive truth-telling about the human condition and its imaginative exhibitions of linguistic freedom, which confront the general culture’s more grotesque manipulations. We need the emotional training sessions poetry conducts us through. We need its previews of coming attractions: heartbreak, survival, failure, endurance, understanding, more heartbreak.

[Suggestion] | Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America, by Tony Hoagland | Harper's Magazine

This essay seems worth sharing here.

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The Poet as Bricoleur in the Era of Trash and Graphomania | Melanie Almeder

O, Miami Edition 6pm Wednesday, April 24 The Betsy-South Beach, 1440 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139 The class will open with a brief outline of the history of the “found poem,” and the possibilities it has created for poets. We will look at models of found poems to consider the decontextualization of language, the foreclosure of irony, and, finally, what it means to be a poet/bricoleur in this era. Melanie Almeder studied literature, creative writing, and art history at the University of Virginia. She received an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in contemporary novel and narrative theory from the University of Florida. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Five Points, the Georgia Review, Seneca Review, and Cortland Review, among others. She lives in Roanoke, Virginia, and teaches English and creative writing at Roanoke College. Her first collection of poetry, On Dream Street, won the Editors’ Prize at Tupelo Press, and was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award. Her poetry has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. In 2011, she was given an Outstanding Faculty Award by the State Council of Higher Education and Dominion Resources.

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It's back!

The Free School for Writing and I took a break. I had a baby, etc. But we're re-starting with a special edition of the Free School during the O, Miami poetry festival. Stay tuned for details!

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Reading for Dennis Hinrichsen's craft talk on the poetic line.

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Energy and Vision in the Poetic Line | Dennis Hinrichsen

The Free School for Writing (O, MIAMI edition) with University of Wynwood + Florida Center for the Literary Arts  7:30pm, Monday, April 11  at Bas Fisher Invitational / 180 NE 39th Street, suite 210 / Miami, FL 33137

Energy and Vision in the Poetic Line  with Dennis Hinrichsen

What distinguishes poetry, obviously, from prose is the poetic line.  The questions are how to use the line effectively on the horizontal to engage the reader with music and vision, and then how to carry the reader via the line break down the page to drive the poem forward to its inevitable close.  This talk will look at a variety of ways of accomplishing this with examples from Keats, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Frost, William Carlos Williams, Hank Williams, Sharon Olds, Philip Levine and others. A packet will be provided.

Dennis Hinrichsen’s full-length collections of poetry include Kurosawa’s Dog (2008 FIELD Poetry Prize), Cage of Water, Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights (1999 Akron Poetry Prize), The Rain that Falls This Far, and The Attraction of Heavenly Bodies.  He has also published a chapbook, Message to Be Spoken into the Left Ear of God.  His awards include an NEA grant, two grants from the State of Michigan, as well as awards from Poetry Northwest and Carolina Quarterly.  He currently teaches at Lansing Community College.

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A Speculative Geometry of Lyricism | Pete Borrebach

Monday, March 14, 7pm: at the end/spring break @ Bas Fisher Invitational

A Speculative Geometry of Lyricism

This craft talk, led by local poet-at-large Peter Borrebach, will seek to create a useful and thoroughly modern visuo-geometric analogy for the lyrical process, to not only look into what is going on when writers and readers have lyrical experiences, but also to give ourselves, as lyrical poem-creators, new insight into our own methodologies. The talk will be highly interactive, involving several writing exercises, lively discussions, recursive equations, and fractal dimensions (please bring a pen and paper). A reading packet is available for download at: http://www.box.net/shared/v4l3gzrfci. Attendees are kindly asked to read these poems in advance of the talk.

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Trailer for Reading for Loaded Objects

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The Material Layer: Reading for Loaded Objects | Denise Delgado

The Material Layer: Reading for Loaded Objects with Denise Delgado

6/29, 7:15-8:30p the end @ artseen 2210 NW 1 Place (in Wynwood). http://bit.ly/cEuPop

I’ve come to think of material objects in fiction as physical things that exist in the world of a story, external to the consciousness of the characters (i.e., not a noun that refers to an object but doesn’t materialize in the story, as in metaphor). These objects work together to compose a “material layer” that can evoke sensory and other associations within the text and in the reader. Writers can use materiality to structure their stories, reveal character, build setting, develop theme.

Some objects are so powerful that they do many things at once to a story. We might call these loaded objects. We could also think of them as charged objects, on-duty objects; but for me they are loaded with possibility, loaded with associations. Our discussion will focus less on what an object means, instead asking: what does it do?

We’ll look at artist William Kentridge’s short video “Tide Table” to consider loaded objects in a visual narrative. We'll also discuss Mercè Rodoreda’s “That Wall, That Mimosa.” Try to read it before class; it’s short and you can find it here: http://tiny.cc/2unde. We may also look at Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle or passages from Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau. Handouts will be provided. REQUIRED READING: Mercè Rodoreda, “That Wall, That Mimosa” (from My Christina & Other Stories) SUGGESTED READING: Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle