Endless Roll – Page 7 – the pelagic school

ENDLESS ROLL // SITE ARCHIVE

in descending chronological order

Approaches (mountain faces)

Use this revision exercise when you need more dimension. It can lead to gentle augmentation, deep re-ordering, or a totally new framework for some portion of your play.

Resonators

Use this exercise for augmenting or deepening pattern in a piece in progress.

Plot Studies (2): The Weird

Given the weird’s relationship to the feeling of wrongness, it’s worth remembering that a codified weird wouldn’t be weird. The weird is a fog and

Plot Studies (2): Landscape Theater

Overview Landscape Theater is the name of the genre of play that Gertrude Stein wrote, as well as the name for the lineage that follows

Plot Studies: What is Plot?

Plot Studies is an ongoing series of investigations into different kinds of plots arising in narrative and dramatic traditions, or extrapolated from case studies of

Day 5: Textile Draft

Today we write the textile draft. A day to weave, to compose with intention, and to step aside from the last four day’s mode of

Day 4: Architectonic Draft

Today we think about shape. (I’ve taken to the word “shape” over words like “structure” or “form.” They mean the same thing in this context—something

Day 3: Musical Draft

Day 3 isn’t as tightly structured as Days 1 and 2; there aren’t multiple iterative stages of many small exercises, just a gulp and a

Day 2: Hearing Voices, Following Voices

Today’s session brings an array of voices and speakers into focus. The goal is to let the voices come forward without rushing the story forward

Day 1: Collecting and Supplying

Overview Today is for gathering materials. The first hour of this day is a slog of tiny, fast exercises. Think of it like building a

Week Five: Textile Draft

I’m way behind, still stumbling through my musical draft of the segment I’m trying to write, but thanks to some deep under-employment about to kick

Week Four: Architectonic Draft

I looked up architectonic again to see if it was substantively different in meaning from architectural and the answer is, not really. It was fading

End of Week Three

If you need another day or two on the musical draft, keep going. It’s important to get to an ending before you think through its

Week Three: Musical Draft

Gather your compost and treasure heaps, friends. It’s time to take our first pass through this thing. No matter how much or little you’ve done

3-draft Workshop Overview

DAY 1 & HOW TO USE THIS WORKSHOP *Note 1: If you’re on the Pelagic School Tiny Letter list, you will get any workshop I

End of Week Two

Hope you had a good week of constellating and germinating and feel provisioned for what’s ahead. I had one of those soft, non-intense but happily

Week Two: Constellation and Proposing

Week Two: constellating, listening, proposing Arrival Re-read your notes from your pre-workshop arrival. Then re-read your notes from the end-of-week reflections and your pod responses.

End of Week One

END OF WEEK ONE: Cull/share/respond/enlarge *Hope you have had a good week of collecting (or thinking about collecting, however you are using this workshop). There’s

somatics 7: corpse pose

The last installment in the somatics workshop is long and maybe even weirder than the last six. We take up corpse pose. The prior installments derived

somatics 6: jointedness

In this installment, we consider jointedness as a condition in which we live and move. The anatomical facts we’ll consider stay general: the directional affordances

somatics 5: seeing

In your eye // lacy face // ocular nerve // writing as reception PRELUDE // REORIENTATION // PHILOSOPHICAL BIT Cast your mind back, briefly, to

somatics 4: roundness

This installment drifts slowly toward the anatomical fact, so there’s a long preface, but the workshop structure remains the same: get a feeling for an

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?

ENDLESS ROLL // SITE ARCHIVE

Approaches (mountain faces)

Resonators

Plot Studies (2): The Weird

Plot Studies (2): Landscape Theater

Plot Studies: What is Plot?

Day 5: Textile Draft

Day 4: Architectonic Draft

Day 3: Musical Draft

Day 2: Hearing Voices, Following Voices

Day 1: Collecting and Supplying

End of Week Five

Week Five: Textile Draft

End of Week Four

Week Four: Architectonic Draft

End of Week Three

Week Three: Musical Draft

3-draft Workshop Overview

End of Week Two

Week Two: Constellation and Proposing

End of Week One

somatics 7: corpse pose

somatics 6: jointedness

somatics 5: seeing

somatics 4: roundness

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

ENDLESS ROLL // SITE ARCHIVE

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