Plein Air Writing - Kathe Izzo
Tuition: $300
Application Form
"Plein Air" meaning open air is a term traditionally used to describe painting outdoors but rarely, if ever, taught as a writing practice. Poet Mary Oliver is known to hide pencils behind trees along her daily dog-walking turf and much nature imagery has long been fodder as metaphors for everything from the solitary artist's path to descriptions of family life as well as an abundant source of poetic imagery & memoir fodder in its own right.
This workshop will explore memoir and creative writing, using nature as a metaphor for looking back on life. Kathe Izzo's provocative exercises set the tone and the spectacular seasonal change to an incoming New England autumn sets the mood.
faculty
Kathe, also known as The Love Artist, is a internationally recognized conceptual artist, poet and essayist, with work in numerous journals and anthologies including the recent Pills, Chills, Thrills and Heartache (edited by Michelle Tea), Aroused (edited by Karen Finley) and The American Bible of Outlaw Poetry. She is the Founding Director of The Shadow Project, an acclaimed program dedicated to implementing personal and community change through writing, derived from her work with traumatized adolescents. Currently working in a variety of mediums as a creative process consultant, she continues to work as a youth advocate Her most ambitious project, The True Love Project, has been documented in her popular blog www.theloveartist.org. Her other blogs include: www.publicloveproject.com, www.seaofloveproject.com and www.theloveshackproject.com.
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Roofmen
-Patricia Fargnoli
Over my head, the roofmen are banging shingles into place
and over them the sky shines with a light that is
almost past autumn, and bright as copper foil.
In the end I will have something to show for their hard labor--
unflappable shingles, dry ceilings, one more measure of things
held safely in a world where safety is impossible.
In another state, a friend tries to keep on living
though his arteries are clogged,
though the operation left a ten-inch scar
and, near his intestines, an aneurysm blossoms
like a deformed flower. His knees and feet
burn with constant pain.
We go on. I don’t know how sometimes.
For a living, I listen eight hours a day to the voices
of the anxious and the sad. I watch their beautiful faces
for some sign that life is more than disaster--
it is always there, the spirit behind the suffering,
the small light that gathers the soul and holds it
beyond the sacrifices of the body. Necessary light.
I bend toward it and blow gently.
And those hammerers above me, bend into the dailiness
of their labor, beneath concentric circles: a roof of sky,
beneath the roof of the universe,
beneath what vaults over it.
And don’t those journeymen
hold a piece of the answer-- the way they go on
laying one gray speckled square after another,
nailing each down, firmly, securely.
