SAINT CARDS
Use this workshop to write microstories, tiny plays, or songs, or as research studies for a character.
This 30-day series takes a relational approach to thinking about character that begins with the question: Who am I without you? (And a dial of adjacent questions: Who am I with you, to you, for you; who are you without me? How am I made, to some degree, of our relation to each other?)
Its basic architecture is grounded in two different frames: the first is the saint card, (agnostically) adopted here for a formal constraint and for its economy and capacity as a place of memory. The saint card in its religious use is a mass-market object used to reflect on a saint; alternately the same basic object is used as a memorial card, tying the remembrance of someone to a particular saint or teaching and distributed at a funeral. Usually there is a portrait on one side and a poem, prayer, micro-biography or remembrance on the other. Each of the 30 prompts in this workshop will aim at this scale: a tiny portrait (whether as image or through description) and a short text of around 100-200 words that could fit on the back of a card. As always, the prompts can be used in many different ways, so think of these dimensions as simply on offer as a tiny, doable form.
The second frame of this workshop’s design is a short reading list of three books that in some way ask what a self is. I’ll draw each day’s angle of approach to the workshop’s questions from these texts. I won’t be including passages or readings from these books in the daily prompts, but rather will give an account of my own working through of these texts in a small series of companion essays, explicitly asking what each book might tell me about how write character. The books are: Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself, Douglas Hofstatder’s I am a Strange Loop, and Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Their combination here is a hunch—these are books that I read when I was in scholarship mode that have left haloes in my practical thinking, and that I’ve wanted to return to, reading as a writing rather than a theorist. Each of these books in different ways looks at the way a self—any self, any “I”—is a being in relation, even a being made of relations. It is from this perspective that I want to think about character.
I guess there’s also a third grounding element to this pop-up which is entirely personal, and which accounts for my embracing the form of the saint card, and that is the desire to remember some people loosely mine—teachers, peers, family friends, relatives—who have died this year, people who feel, in different ways, part of who I am and how I think. For each startling loss of the last year, I’ve felt the urge to write living space to hold their memory—to conjure those people from the ground of my own evidence, to record the simultaneous sense of their absence with their living presence in the ways they somehow made me who I am. The saint card as a form percolated to the surface of my imagination; I wanted to make each of them their own. The train of thought went on from there.
This sequence, however, is totally agnostic with respect to whether you take it toward memorial or fiction, in panorama around a single figure or addressed to thirty different ones. And it is not cumulative—so you may just find that one or two of the days lead to writing, and that would be an equally fine use of the workshop.
Think of the intention of this workshop as using this card frame—portrait and tiny text—to make a holding place for a presence, and for that presence to be understood socially, relationally.