saint cards hub – the pelagic school

SAINT CARDS

Use this workshop to write microstories, tiny plays, or songs, or as research studies for a character.

Workshop overview: where it comes from and how it works (click to expand)

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.

Saint Cards 1

Saint Cards 2

Saint Cards 3

Saint Cards 4

Saint Cards 5

Saint Cards 6

Saint Cards 7

Saint Cards 8

Saint Cards 9

Saint Cards 10

Saint Cards 11

Saint Cards 12

Saint Cards 13

Saint Cards 14

Saint Cards 15

Saint Cards 16

Saint Cards 17

Saint Cards 18

Saint Cards 19

Saint Cards 20

Saint Cards 21

Saint Cards 22

Saint Cards 23

Saint Cards 24

Saint Cards 25

Saint Cards 26

Saint Cards 27

Saint Cards 28

Saint Cards 29

Saint Cards 30

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?

SAINT CARDS

mailing list only for site updates, group and workshop announcements