the pelagic school

a resource for navigating the process of getting writing written

The Pelagic School is a living library of prompts, games, guided workshops, and meditations on narrative traditions, as well as a hub for ongoing writing groups and events.

Methods embraced here are image-rich and structurally expansive; they are gently weird and always playful; they operate through open-mindedness and a commitment to the pleasures of not knowing, when we set out, what the thing we are writing will become.

The material here is written by Karinne Keithley Syers, and grows out of years of teaching and thinking across playwriting, choreography, sound-making, and scholarship. Most of the material addresses storytelling broadly and can apply to any narrative project. Some material is specifically pointed toward writing for performance.

daily prompt lottery

—a warmup to get your language and image brain moving
—a tuning exercise to tune into your commitments or interests of the day
—a generator to grow a seed of something new

warmup

word sifter

Write a sentence at random, giving it plenty of nouns and adjectives and verbs. Then rewrite the words of that sentence into a new sentence, upending the original order and sense. Feel free to let words migrate across grammatical functions, so that nouns turn into their verb variations, and so on. Repeat three or four times. Fine to add articles and other small connective tissue as needed. 

tuning exercise

edge of the field

Use the tuning time to ask yourself, either through a timed writing or a simple list format, what else is at the edges of your vision or interest that you want to make space for in your writing practice. Keep in mind that this could also be a new approach to something that’s already in your writing.  

generator

Valley Fold (Generator)

A generative exercise for creating a compact event as a springboard for a story. (There’s also a development version of this exercise for a story in progress when it’s lacking some zing.)

In origami, a mountain fold is made by creasing a section of paper along its middle axis and then joining two edges together so that the crease becomes a small peak. A valley fold is the opposite, where the crease is tucked downwards and the two edges come together, sometimes disappearing the paper in between into a supportive pocket (which may or may not be unfolded again in a later step). We’ll take this full possibility of the valley fold that hides the connecting paper for this exercise. The analogy followed here uses the what-happens aspect of narrative—the event sequence—as the paper to be folded.

The preparation for this exercise is a stretch of exploratory, improvisational writing. Try tracking a figure or character, one summoned to mind, perhaps from the archive of strangers you’ve observed out there in the world, someone who sticks in mind. Do a timed writing session, of at least half an hour, so you have a chance to get bored and a chance to push through the boredom, where you follow this character around, narrating what they’re doing, thinking, where they’re going — any kind of trail you can pick up on. Let it be an improvisation. You might do this in one sitting or you might do it in several. If you want a scaffold for this exploratory writing, try some of the prompts from the Saint Cards workshop, which consider character from the standpoint of relation. 

After setting this writing aside for a stretch (take a walk if you’re doing this in one sitting, or leave it for a day if you’re doing it in several), read back through it identify two vivid landmarks that surround a stretch of meander or exploration. Fold the narrative so that those two landmarks are now brought together, either into tight adjacency or placed one into the other, so that what might have been a simple event is now complex, or what might have been distant events are now happening in the same timespace. The stretch that has been valley folded to make this joining is now either a hidden or supportive space. Call the edge parts the joined event. Call the hidden parts the fold.

Consider two things:

(1) How can you come upon this joined event in the telling of your story? If there’s a new force or vividness to it, does that call for a rethink of how it appears or occurs, whether just in its local framing of the paragraphs around it, or in the larger framing of the entire event sequence that precedes it? Could it be a beginning? How does the fold influence your understanding of the joined event, without having to be shown to the light or actually explained? Or does the fold work to discard that understanding, so that your joined event is free of its prior tethering in cause or explanation?

(2) What follows from here? How does this set up a potential tone or energy for a sequence of events to follow? Or does it want to be a microstory or miniature, a single compact event, complete in itself? 

upcoming groups and workshops

PROCESS & PHENOMENON — FACILITATED WRITING GROUPS

P&P groups meet for five sessions: an introduction and then four cycles of sharing and responding to each other’s fresh pages. Emphasis is on making choices around practice and finding out what they yield. Work shared is fresh, unfinished, in emergence. The groups follow a witnessing-based response structure designed to maximize freedom in the emerging piece of writing and to expand the whole group’s repertoire of writing ideas and permissions. Sharing and response happen asynchronously via shared docs; the Zoom meeting is a chance to digest the process together and enjoy the company of your groupmates. Meetings are facilitated by Karinne, who also joins in the process of responding to everyone’s work. Be aware that as a group member, you will have an obligation to read and respond to each other’s work, a commitment of 1-2 hours per response cycle. Groups are for 4-6 writers.

$150-200 sliding scale for 5-session P&P groups. You can also pay what you can if the bottom of the sliding scale is still out of reach for you. 

UPCOMING P&P GROUPS THIS FALL

A new P&P group will start August 16th, meet weekly on Wednesdays 1-2p Eastern til Sept 13

WORKSHOP IN WRITING FOR AND BEYOND PERFORMANCE

Fall 2023: Audio Edition

$350/pay what you can

8 meetings with a two-week break mid-way; additional one-on-on conferences as desired

Thursdays 12-2:15 Eastern, weekly Aug 31-Sept 28; no meetings Oct 5 and 12; weekly listening rooms Oct 19-Nov 2

Exploring writing for and recording voices (mostly our own), field recording and sound libraries, and the edge space between sound and voice that becomes its own venue. Lots of guided exercises. The first two thirds of the workshop will orient toward studies in the compositional elements of sound and voice, playing with them both separately and in combination. In the break between the two phases, scaffolded compositional prompts through one-on-on conversations. The last portion of the workshop will approach and complete a composition. Culminating in a public festival of new shortform audio work.

Equipment: Ideally you’ll use a vocal mic, a field recorder, and a DAW (digital audio workstation which is to say an editing program) – although you could always just record the whole thing on voicemail and string it together in Quicktime. There are free DAWs out there (and most pay DAWs have long free trials) and lots of affordable field recording and vocal mics you can pair with a phone or laptop. I can help with recommendations. Some libraries and schools also have equipment you can check out. An example of budget-end recommended equipment: DAW: Reaper ($60, two month free trial); field recorder Zoom H1N ($99); Audio Technica dynamic USB vocal mic ($60).

Fall 2023: Audio Edition

$350/pay what you can

8 meetings with a two-week break mid-way; additional one-on-on conferences as desired

Thursdays 12-2:15 Eastern, weekly Aug 31-Sept 28; no meetings Oct 5 and 12; weekly listening rooms Oct 19-Nov 2

Exploring writing for and recording voices (mostly our own), field recording and sound libraries, and the edge space between sound and voice that becomes its own venue. Lots of guided exercises. The first two thirds of the workshop will orient toward studies in the compositional elements of sound and voice, playing with them both separately and in combination. In the break between the two phases, scaffolded compositional prompts through one-on-on conversations. The last portion of the workshop will approach and complete a composition. Culminating in a public festival of new shortform audio work.

Equipment: Ideally you’ll use a vocal mic, a field recorder, and a DAW (digital audio workstation which is to say an editing program) – although you could always just record the whole thing on voicemail and string it together in Quicktime. There are free DAWs out there (and most pay DAWs have long free trials) and lots of affordable field recording and vocal mics you can pair with a phone or laptop. I can help with recommendations. Some libraries and schools also have equipment you can check out. An example of budget-end recommended equipment: DAW: Reaper ($60, two month free trial); field recorder Zoom H1N ($99); Audio Technica dynamic USB vocal mic ($60).

pelagic radio

Pelagic Radio is a freeform channel for pop-up workshops, courses, guided writing prompts, and occasional conversations. Distributed as a podcast. The most recent microseason is The Map Room, a pop-up workshop that uses map thinking as as source for storytelling. Coming up next: Gertrude Stein in Space & Time. 

why the pelagic?

Creative process is navigational; strategies for moving through process accrue over time, yet each one is a new encounter with a sea of vast possibility. A life spent making things, for me, is marked by the devotions and pleasures of repeatedly putting myself out into that sea. 

The pelagic zone of the ocean is the part that is far from shore, inclusive of both the upper surface and the abyssal depths. This school is here to help you make it across to the other shore. 

About kKS

Karinne Keithley Syers is a writer and teacher whose work spans plays, songs, sound, dance, animation, video, bookmaking, essay, and points in between. Before founding the Pelagic School, she taught at Amherst College, Bard Microcollege Holyoke, Mount Holyoke College, The New School/Eugene Lang, NYU/Experimental Theater Wing, Hollins University, Brooklyn College, New Jersey City University, American Dance Festival, and many other schools. She was the founding editor of 53rd State Press, cofounder (with Chris Yon) of the dance palace Ur, co-host (with Jason Grote) of the Acousmatic Theater Hour on WFMU, co-instigator of posses Joyce Cho and Machiqq, and is a currently resident playwright at New Dramatists. Her museum and chamber opera Montgomery Park, or Opulence won a 2011 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Production; other work has been seen or heard at, on, or in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (Issue 64), The Chocolate Factory Theater, A.P.E. Gallery, WFMU, Incubator Arts Project, the Australian Broadcast Network’s late lamented sound art show Soundproof, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Dixon Place, Tonic NYC, Galapagos Art Space, and Surf Reality House of Urban Savages. She has an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College (2006) and a PhD in English from CUNY Graduate Center (2014).

Find her personal website this way: FANCYSTITCHMACHINE.ORG