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

Minute Lists (10)

Choose five minute lists of your own or use these: parts of a body in action (i.e. a finger curling, a liver filtering); plants with whom your body has an affinity; animals with whom your body has an affinity; words of five letters; names for new brands of socks.

*Minute Lists are a language brain warmup. Choose four or five lists, and for each, set a one-minute timer and write as many words as belong to that list as come to mind, writing at speed without pausing. Restart the timer immediately and move on to the next list. Although the list presents a rule, accept any word that your brain surfaces, even if it is a false match or a made-up word. The speed and free-for-all ethos are aimed at getting your vocabulary moving for a writing session ahead, but minute lists can also be a little like panning for gold, surfacing shiny things—names, objects, expressions—that you might want to use. I occasionally trawl my lists, circling pleasing words with a pen of a second color for easy retrieval later.

tuning exercise

Your houses

A tuning exercise for thinking about story spaces you hold in memory.

Think of the houses that leave an imprint on your life, perhaps your early life or an intense time of growth in your life. Is there one whose features have left a trace in your imagination, whether it shows up in some distorted or partial way in your dreams, or floats to mind occasionally, or whose atmosphere saturates a strong memory?

Make a list of three or four buildings that have stayed with you in this way, and choose the one that seems the most resonant.

This tuning exercise moves via lists and mini-freewrites.

List the architectural features of this house (or other building) in the order they come to mind. See if you can fill a column all the way down a page. Put yourself into this building in your mind’s eye. Move up and down its halls, its stairs, a memory scan to recuperate lost details.

Select a subset of five or six items from your list. Include some elements that you had already marked about this house, that are right there at the foreground in your memory, but also things that only surfaced through the act of extending your list.

Then for each item in your subset, set a timer and write for one minute, flooding the page with whatever language comes to mind—detailed description, associative mood words, particular memories, anything else.

If you want to expand your subset and write more, do so.

Otherwise, read over the mini freewrites with an eye toward the type of narrative space they evoke.

Make one final list, mining your freewrites for:

— possible spaces for a story to exist in;

— possible features of a space that might offer a path into some kind of transition in a story, where an appearance gives way to a new unfolding direction for the story to move in.

As you write this final list, allow yourself both to borrow very literally and to extrapolate abstractly from your house and its print in your memory.

generator

ballad

(for expanding something already in process)

Visualize the world of the thing you are writing: its geographic center, its horizons. Then imagine a figure who could know about that world, perhaps from far in the future of your story, perhaps by virtue of reports or surveillance, perhaps because of magic omniscience or prescience. Write a ballad for that figure to sing, that gives a history of the world of your story. Set it wherever you want in time and space. Borrow the tune of an old ballad or a corrido and invent new words. Use the exercise to let the song tell you something you didn’t know about your story.

upcoming groups and workshops

DAILY TEACHER

Thursdays in June, 2024 // 1-3(ish)pm Eastern // on Zoom

A simple, low-key weekly convening. We’ll bring small teacher texts, share them, glean prompts from them, spend some time writing and share again. No homework. Drop in for a day or come for all. $15 suggested per session, but as always Pelagic School is pay-what-you-can.

email KARINNE@PELAGICSCHOOL.NET to sign up.

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

no P&P scheduled at this time

WORKSHOP IN WRITING FOR AND BEYOND PERFORMANCE

$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

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

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks.

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now.

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment.

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”?

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them?

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others.

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it.

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?