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

Conversions

Make a list of 100 objects in your immediate environment. They should all be nouns, though your nouns might come with their own adjectives.

Then select a subset of these words (maybe 20) and convert them to infinitive verbs by simply rewriting them with the word “to” in front of them.

Then select a subset of these infinitives (maybe 10) and convert them to gerunds (-ing).

Finally select a subset (maybe 4) of those gerunds and put them into a sentence form that looks either like this:

[name] is [gerund] with a [leftover noun from your first list].

or like this

[name] is [gerund] the [leftover noun from your first list].

tuning exercise

tuning your monster

Somewhere once, I came across the phrase “he gave birth to a monster of his imagination,” I think in reference to a philosopher. As a tuning, seek out resident images or seeds of images in your imagination that you could nurture into something grotesque or monstrous. Look for traces of inchoate smashers, destroyers, squashers, devourers. You could think of this in relation to writing temperament, as a pathway into embracing wrongness, going against whatever rules of good behavior you’ve absorbed. Or you could use this to conjure a monster, in which case you should give your monster a name and then think about how the monster might teach you something or notice possibilities that your non-monstrous writer mind wouldn’t.

There is a linked generator exercise for this. (monster soliloquy). If you’re only doing the tuning, use it as a way to ask yourself about what good behavior and bad behavior mean to you, as a writer, about internalized rules and about impulses you rarely allow yourself to follow.

generator

following character generator

*The script of the exercise is below. If you lead yourself through this exercise, read each step, do it, and then read the next, and so on. This exercise relies on spending time eyes closed to summon a figure from your imagination. You can also play the audio guide for a more seamless experience. You’ll need a sheet of paper nearby.*

Close your eyes and allow a person to appear in your imagination. See them from behind.

Follow that person. They are going somewhere. Watch them as they walk.

Open your eyes and write down something descriptive about that person, just notes on who they are or what they look like. (It may be incomplete; don’t worry about wholeness.)

Close your eyes again. Watch your person go into a place, or space, that you cannot enter. Watch them come back out. They have something in their hand now. What is is? Open your eyes and write down what’s in their hand.

Close your eyes again. Follow that person. How do they walk? What is the emotional tone of the way they carry themselves through the world? Open your eyes and write down notes on that.

Close your eyes again. Follow that person as they walk. What is going through their mind? Open your eyes and write that down.

Close your eyes again. See this person as a child, around the age of 4. What delights them? Open your eyes and write that down.

Close your eyes again. See this person as a child of 8 or 9. Something happened that they will always remember. What is it? Open your eyes and write that down.

Close your eyes again. See this person on the cusp of adulthood. What motivates them as they envision their future? What forces do they perceive in the world, both those that pressure them and those they could exert. Open your eyes and write that down.

Close your eyes again. See this person as an aging person through adulthood. What are the large markers of transition in their life? Open your eyes and write several moments/events of transition down.

Close your eyes again. See this person imagining the death they would like to have. What is their vision of a good death? Map out the room they are in in your imagination. What are the objects in the room? What is the quality of the light? Where is it? Who is there? Open your eyes and write down some of those details.

Close your eyes and move back in time to some moment in this person’s life, any moment. They are talking. Give them an audience. This might be a person they are talking to, or it might be a theatrical imagination of them speaking directly to an audience. They are directing their speaking to someone who is not themselves.

Write what they say. Write for 20 minutes straight. Incorporate a story they tell about another person; also weave in words you circled from your warmup lists.

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?