I’m so excited to be newly offering in-person writing workshops! See below for my current offerings, and email me with any questions: cactuswrenwriter@gmail.com
The Essay as Collage
When I was a teenager in the late 90s, I made collages. Hundreds of them, everywhere—on the backs of mix tapes, glued into journals, taped to my walls. The floor of my bedroom was littered with empty glue sticks and paper slivers that stuck to my bare feet. I cut up glossy magazine women, ripped apart colors, extracted letters from the burden of too-big words. And then I glued them into new forms. There was something about collage that allowed me to alchemize the strangeness of adolescence. Through the process of cleaving and rearranging, I found structure, meaning, and voice.
So, it’s no wonder that I have an affinity for the essay form. For me, an essay is a collage—able to hold the personal and theoretical, the science and fantasy, research and metaphor, all of the beautiful-horrible-mysterious parts of our lives. The essay as collage is unconcerned with chronology or the literary rules of dead white men. The essay is a time traveler, a renegade, a god of fragmentation and juxtaposition. The essay knows that there are infinite ways to arrange pieces to make a whole, and that powerful, surprising connections arise when we give those pieces new form.
This 1-day generative writing workshop will meet in person at Ramona’s Book Bus (downtown Brevard, NC). We’ll read together, generate new writing through a series of prompts and exercises, and share with one another. There will also be glue sticks, scissors, and collaging materials to help us (re)imagine possibility and form. Come ready to write, play, and wonder.
