3-Draft Workshop: Musical/Architectonic/Textile

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 fruitful weeks. Most of what I did was draw/diagram or talk into my voice recorder dictating fragments of dialogue while out on walks.

However much or little you’ve done this week, let that be enough. Deborah Hay, one of the heroines of the part of the dance world I was educated in, uses ongoing meditations to undergird improvisational practice, like a little question or statement you put into your mind on a loop while dancing. Once when I took a workshop with her, the meditation was: What if where I am is what I need? (Might have paraphrased that.) It worked for me when I took lack or deficiency out of the equation and took what I had to work with seriously, addressed myself to its potential, took it on its own terms. So: what if what you’ve gathered so far is what you need to launch the musical draft this coming week?

REFLECTION

Read back through everything you wrote, drew, or notated this week. Then do a 5 or 10-minute freewrite or doodle on the following questions:

What did you learn this week—about the project, about your interests?

What came into focus or feels like it’s moving toward some kind of clarity?

Did anything surprise or delight you in what emerged this week?

What kinds of rhythms or routines are beginning to hold this project in place?

POD SHARE

After that, select a subset of things you found or made to share with your pod or to present to your own attention for self-podding. Again, if you are self-podding (I am) or wig-podding, I think it’s important not to do this step in your head.

Let this subset be representative of both heat (where you feel yourself gaining traction or pleasure) and range (traversing the tonal range of whatever you know so far of the “whole”).

POD RESPONSE

As with last week, let your responses continue to articulate

—emergent patterns, images, themes, or ways of being that you see. Note both those that continue from what you saw in week one, and those that feel new this week;

—mood and tone. I’ll have more to say about mood as a musical and logical parameter as we start our drafts tomorrow, but for now let me just say let’s valorize mood as a diagnostic word for what is growing in our pod-mates writing.

Add: one gift offering to your pod-mate of a poem, passage, or lyric for them to commit to memory. If what comes to mind is long, flag a single passage within it but send along the whole thing. As you choose your gift, think about genealogy (including cool aunts, formidable ancestors and black sheep), patron saints, fairy godmothers, familiars… So that you are offering both an author (a theorist, a poet, a companion in arms, a teacher) and a crystalline object that author made.

If you are self-podding, ask yourself: who do I want to learn from? Alternately perhaps something jumps to mind and then you ask yourself why do I want to learn from this?

When you get your gift text, do your best to commit it to memory. It’s an old way of ingesting something deeply that has been thrown out in the bathwater educational progress.

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Table of Contents

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?