groups – the pelagic school

groups + workshops

UPCOMINg: winter/spring 2023

Email karinne@pelagicschool.net to inquire or register. All groups meet on zoom, all listed times are Eastern Standard.

PROCESS & PHENOMENON

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 5-7 writers.

$150-200 sliding scale for 5-session P&P groups and $75-100 sliding scale for Mini-Ongoing 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

The next group meets five consecutive Mondays from 10-11am Eastern, starting June 12

WORKSHOP FOR & BEYOND PERFORMANCE

THREE APPROACHES: MUSICAL/ARCHITECTONIC/TEXTILE: AUDIO EDITION

$250/pay what you can

NEXT AUDIO WORKSHOP LATE SUMMER/EARLY FALL, CHECK BACK MIDSUMMER

This spring’s workshop will manifest in audio. We will move through a complete process for a short audio piece for voice and sound. Our group sessions will be balanced between guided writing work and sharing/listening/responding. We will follow the musical/architectonic/textile structure of approaches to drafting and remaking that I have been playing with for several years now.

In addition to group meetings, there will be an initial short one-on-one conference with me (between our introduction and the launch of our musical block), and you will share sound or text with listening pods for simple accountability in the working breaks.

The workshop will culminate in a public festival of everyone’s audio pieces. (Optional if you prefer not to share.)

Equipment:

You’ll need a DAW (digital audio workstation), such as Audacity, Garage Band, Logic, Audition, Hindenburg, etc. There are lots of free and cheap “lite” versions of good DAWS out there.

You’ll need a field recorder (such as a Zoom H1N $99) or a way to adapt your phone to a field recorder (external mic).

And you’ll (possibly*) need a vocal mic and interface that allows you to record in to your computer. (A good low-cost version would be a Shure 58 mic ($99) and an M-Audio Solo interface ($49). (*You could make do with your field recorder if you don’t want to set up a vocal mic.)

I have a small fund to help with equipment purchase for folks in need so please don’t let equipment costs be a barrier.

READING AS A WRITER

$425-500 sliding scale or pay-what-you-can

Tuesdays, Aug 30-Nov 8, with no meetings on Sept. 20 or Oct. 18

Limited to 9

We will practice ways of reading that allow us to glean permission, prompt, courage, and provocation. We will practice ways of writing that commit to being responsive, susceptible, suggestible, and playfully decentered. Part of our reading list will be held in common as a group, part will be chosen individually.

We will create a small set of short-form pieces for and beyond performance. Each week will involve writing both an improvisatory exercise text, and a more considered short-form piece. The workshop is clustered into three three-week blocks. While you are welcome to write as many and as short shortform pieces as you want, we’ll aim at using each three week block as a writing duration for one short-form piece.

The form of the thing will always be up to you, but what “for and beyond” might mean is one piece written for live performance on a stage, and one piece written as the archive of a fictional performance, or as an audio piece or artist book text, or as a story.

Other workshops I offer focus on revision and different ways of thinking and approaching the writing in successive drafts. Reading as a Writer incorporates a different approach to the combing and working of material that belongs to revision; instead of working in stages, reworking, grafting, undoing and redoing will be constant possibilities within the generative work of writing something new in response to the permissions found inside of what we are reading.

Meetings will be a combination of full-group conversations and writing exercises, cold-reading outside readings and shares of our new scenes, breakout groups, and short reading-partner responses.

Outside of the meetings, expect to read one new thing (of various scales, according to your interest) and write 2-10(ish) new pages per week. Sometimes you will read your workshop-mates’ work outside of class; sometimes we will share through cold readings during the workshop meetings. The break weeks are break weeks.

We practice a witnessing-based response structure that is designed not to interfere with the writer’s own curiosities, and to tune into the emergent properties and potentialities of a new text.

9 TUESDAYS separated into three three-week sections with a week off in between

12-2:15 ET, on Zoom, with a 15 min break.

Additional one-on-one conferences can be scheduled twice over the stretch of the fall, for check-ins, mentorship, and conversation.

Sunday sessions 1: Gertrude stein in Space + time (part 1)

Sunday Sessions are chances to join a small group for thinking and writing through materials from the pelagic school archive. This spring’s Sunday Session takes up the first unit of the Gertrude Stein in Space + Time course. Participants should plan to read through the course material (though not necessarily the “further reading” materials) before the session. We will use the session to do some writing, optional sharing, and discussing, always with the purpose of finding out how this material might be enlivening or enlarging for our own writing.

Date TBD

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?