Process & Phenomenon – the pelagic school

Process & Phenomenon Group Hub

GROUP OVERVIEW

The Process

This group structure has two basic elements. The first is that we each devise a specific process we’ll follow as we write. Our process might be defined by formal parameters, by work time and place details, by active prompts or riddles—there are many possible approaches. The active question is: what does this process yield? What happens in my writing if I make these decisions about a writing session? You might fine-tune, augment, or rebel against your process over the course of the group, and you’re free to do whatever you want, obviously. We use the process to create some kind of simple limitation, a task that specifies what we do when we sit down to write. But the design of our process should also take into account the question of what we want to be open to, or porous to, during this little season of writing. Our first meeting will be dedicated to proposing different ways we might specify our process. More notes on that at the end of this letter.

The Phenomenon

We’ll build our responses around a set of questions tuned toward describing the emerging phenomenon that is your piece of writing so that each week, as we turn again to our own writing after hearing responses, we hopefully perceive its emergent being with more breadth and perspective, and this in turn lets it become itself more fully. These questions are elemental and unobtrusive: What is it made of? How is it built? What are its energies? What seems to be growing in it, what is active? What is my experience of being in its presence, how does it act on me?

My experience with this feedback structure is that it leaves open a wide field of possibility for the thing we are making to become what it can be, rather than mimicking the values or structures of some other thing we (or fellow group members) think is “good writing” — or even what we think is writing. It’s very much oriented toward perceiving potentiality without limiting for each other our ideas of how to follow up on that opening. I’ve come to understand it as a process of witnessing each writer in turn, without seeking any kind of consensus around what we’re all aiming for (or whether we’re even aiming at all).

There is one hard and fast rule that I impose on the responses—and this can be weird and awkward at first because our social impulses tend to pull us otherwise and because other critical feedback models often rely on judgments of what is “working” or “not working.” This is that we keep our markers of both pleasure and displeasure off of each other’s writing. We’ll talk more about this in our first meeting.

Video Meets

Video meetings will last an hour. These are not times to share work or respond to it—that considered work will be done on our own timing. The video meets give us a chance to process, ask questions, and get more of a feeling of community than we would have without seeing faces. It’s meant to approximate the circle at the end of a dance or theater class when we report to each other on our experience, not just to share, but also because making the time to reflect tends to help focus and clarify our experience. I try to wrap things up right at the hour, and will launch into the day’s questions within a few minutes of the top of the hour. If you can’t make a meeting or will be joining late, email me to let me know, if you can.

Posts

We’ll post fresh pages each week to a Google Drive folder by end of day, 2 days prior to our meeting. There’s no hard limit on page count, but expect that your groupmates will have 10-15 minutes of reading time for your pages each week.

Responses

We’ll keep one shared document for each author, to which we’ll add to each week, initialing our responses. Limit your responses to a paragraph of notes, or even three or four bullet points. See “Response Guidelines” for a framework of questions to start from that help to tune toward phenomenological description rather than critique. Again, there will be more discussion about this in the first meeting. You should expect to spend about 1-2 hours each cycle reading and responding.

mechanics

Google Drive

We’ll use Drive to post fresh pages and to store our response documents. For fresh pages, please include your name and date so it’s easy to sort as the weeks accumulate. You should get a notification that you’re being added to the shared drive, but let me know if you need a different email address for the invite.

Group Page

Each group gets its own private page on pelagicschool.net. I use Memberspace to manage how the site is accessed and will add you to a membership called p+p [month/day]. If you’re already a member, the group membership will be a second membership added onto your current membership with your existing logins. If you’re not a member of the site already, you will get a membership invitation and you’ll have to make yourself logins.

On the group page, you’ll be able to find links to the Zooms, to the Google Drive, our meeting schedule, and an archive of my notes from each of our meetings.

notes on process

What you set up for yourself to follow is entirely up to you, but here are some ideas worth considering:

Are you interested in creating formal games for yourself, whether as warmup or generative exercise or pattern embedded in the thing you are writing?
Is there something you would like to fold into this season of writing that isn’t writing but might inform your mood? (Like a walk, drawing, reading, calling a friend, weeding, learning a song.)
Is there an external source you want to fold into your practice, that might offer you fodder or unfamiliar angles of attention on familiar things?
Are there reflective elements you want to weave in to your daily or weekly calendar, like self-interviews or daily pages or moments to list the questions you have about where your writing is going?
Are there material containers that might help define the process (like, fill a small notebook with observations or sketches then use that as your image bank, or write exactly two pages every day, or write only in green ink, or talk into a voice recorder while walking then transcribe)?
Are you interested in counter-habit? Do you want to deliberately work in different ways than you have before?

responses guidelines

CREDO and RATIONALE

We are working from a newly conceived or clarified process, letting these processes produce material we’re just calling fresh pages. We add a group practice with these response guidelines, which practice description and attempt to withhold judgment, leaving room for each writer to nurture their own discernment with respect to what is worth following or abandoning in the material.

The response structure is designed to take care not to intrude on the emergent logic of the writing while still reflecting back to it some of that logic, as perceived by each reader. This value of non-intrusion is embraced in part because praise can limit fresh writing, and critical judgment is not yet needed. That’s just trying to protect the growing thing from busy hands. The other rationale is that I want to make space for the fresh pages we all write together to be an exploratory vehicle, offering the possibility of taking us to places we couldn’t anticipate. So often, critical response, even enthusiastic or kind response, is based on applying an existing set of values and an existing sense of possible destinations for a process to point toward—which assumes not only that a consensus exists between us as to what is good, but also that we already know this new writing wants to be part of that old consensus, or knows what it is enough to shape itself to those values.

This group process’s main aim is to nurture the possibilities that: the writing process is a collaboration between the writer and the emergent piece of writing; the writing has space to become what it wants to become. To nurture, I understand as giving witness without giving judgment. Of course this is in part an impossibility, as our capacity to perceive emergent patterns and interests in each other’s work will show the signature of our own thinking, our own pleasures and appetites as readers and writers. (That is one of the other fruits of the process, that in responding and reading each other’s responses, we also witness ourselves and each other as thinkers.)

We work with the assumption that no one—not the writer and not the reader—knows exactly what this writing needs to become—or if it even has “needs” to begin with. We work with the mandate to observe, listen, and make space for it to continue becoming what it is. As responders, we try not to intrude with on the relationship between the writer and their pages. We mark nothing for success or failure, only say what we see.

Put most simply, we attempt to describe the thing before us. Sometimes that calls on us to describe the way it acts on us as readers, but in general try to limit yourself to describing what the thing is. Try as much as possible to speak about it on its own terms. Because these are fresh pages, you might be describing fragmentary appearances, moments, potentialities. You’re looking for signs of life. Because these are fresh pages, you might also encounter material that is vulnerable or volatile. Be generous when you do encounter that; please think of the container of the group as a private space for new writing. We might share material with each other that we wouldn’t choose to share more broadly in public spaces and although our descriptions might note the volatility of something, please do not offer your own judgment, even if you have one.

As writers, try to use the responses of others as a way of getting fresh eyes on the thing you are making. Let it show itself to you through this prismatic set of eyes.

PROCESS & USEFUL QUESTIONS

Here are some useful questions to guide the descriptive part of the feedback session. You don’t need to answer all of them. I suggest taking rapid notes on your responses to the most salient questions and then selecting three or four thoughts to offer as concisely as possible. Because we’re tuned toward potentiality, I find that the most useful responses step back from the material by a degree or two of abstraction—this leaves room for new instances to grow from those abstract descriptions, and also creates a little shared set of prompts that can be picked up on and played with by other group members. For example, I might note that something seems to think in threes, or that it carefully lays out pictures and then burns them down. I like to use “it” as the writing’s pronoun. Describe the writing, not the writer.

What is it made of?

How is it built?

What does it do?

What are its verbs? (This is a great way to discern pattern, i.e. it loops, it stutters, it soothes…)

What are its materials? (What kinds of images is it made of, what vocabulary, what syntax, what palette of actions)

What does it ask of the audience or reader?

What space does it propose we (writing and reader/audience) inhabit together?

What traditions or forms does it draw on or make reference to?

What are its energies?

What is its mood or temperament?

What latent patterns does it hold that give clues to possible structures it might eventually inhabit?

What’s alive here; what has the energy of something living?

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?