WRITING WORKSHOP IN ITALY
VITORCHIANO, JUNE 15 - JUNE 25 2005
Centro Studi Pokkoli
Discover your voice amid Etruscan echoes.
Discover the Spirit of Place
Traditions the world over hold sacred the spirit of place. The myths of Africa, Asia, Australia, China, Tibet, and the Americas have all celebrated the guardian spirits known to the ancient Mediterranean world as the “genii loci.”
The spirit of place may reside in a feature of the landscape, in a quality of the climate, in an animal or plant of the natural or mythic habitat, in the character of a people still thriving in or long since vanished from that place, or in an artefact passed down to us through time. It may be expressed by an emblem, a symbol, a work of art, or a mode of speech.
The spirit of place, often unnoticed and unquestioned, nourishes our roots, our connection to past times and places and acts upon our imagination whenever we set off from home intent on new discoveries. Often our response to our surroundings remains unconscious and untapped, yet it is the info rming power of place which shapes our wonder and our impression of our environment wherever we may be.
The two workshops scheduled for June 2005 will offer an opportunity to find new approaches to the Spirit of Place. The poetry workshop will be taught by Rick Mulkey. The fiction/creative non-fiction workshop will be taught by Susan Tekulve and Linda Lappin. It will focus on. aspects of narrative writing and story-making common to both genres.
POETRY Statement of purpose
In keeping with the program's theme, The Spirit of Place, the poetry workshop will consider the ways place affects the writer's imagination. Through exercises, readings, and discussion, participants will consider how place is a physical landscape which touches a deep-rooted desire, and a poetic landscape that exiles all writers as they seek out the mysterious in order to find the familiar. The poetry sessions will provide opportunities for new writers as well as more established writers seeking a fuller understanding of craft. Daily workshops will emphasize writing new poems while taking risks and pushing boundaries in the poetic process.
Rick Mulkey
FICTION AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION Statement of purpose
This workshop, addressed to experienced and beginning fiction and non-fiction writers, will explore new ways to ground our writing in the spirit of place. As writers we all have our spiritual geographies -- our maps of terrains trekked across or still to conquer -- with their islands, oceans, highways and parking lots, cemeteries, signposts, landing strips or ley lines. We will retrace those inner itineraries and attempt to unlock the voices and impressions hidden in places of the past. Through special exercises, discussions, readings, we will learn to evoke and recreate atmospheres of those places and make them come alive in our writing. We will also explore the very specific spirit of place in Vitorchiano, a medieval village of Etruscan origins in a unique natural and architectural setting, and we will craft new pieces of writing in response to that spirit.
Linda Lappin
In her autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings , Eudora Welty states, “Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.” She argues that like travelers, writers are preoccupied with discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life as well as in the lives of others. Connections slowly emerge. “Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. “ Often these connections are made in retrospect, from a distance, after you have traveled to a new place and are able to look back from where you've come. In this workshop, we will explore how to look back through a lens of distance and memory at places and people in order to recreate the illusion of fiction. We will also examine narrative techniques and descriptive techniques shared by both genres of fiction and creative nonfiction.
Susan Tekulve
