A text and collage workshop

Artist Patricia Thornton and I ran Happy Happenstance workshop at Phoenix Art Space, where we had a lovely turnout and great fun reimagining newspaper images and text into poetry. I love examining ordinary sentences in slanted light, mucking about and playing with glue and shapes, drinking tea, eating biscuits, and listening to interesting people tell their stories in the room or on the page. I think the persona in me representing JOY is about nine years old, and I am grateful for that. Anyway, I thought I would share the writing workshop I (loosely) led for this week’s blog. 

Also, we collected all the cut-up scraps and had five-second conversations, which were brilliant, revealing, and helpful for scriptwriting. 

I think it’s super important to hold a place for low-fi experimentation because easy-flowing waters dislodge gems. After the workshop, a poem, grown from a line of reorganized text, began to rattle. I’ll share it when it’s finished; until then, see the photos below, followed by the workshop. Let me know if you try it! 

Happy Happenstance Workshop

“Language depends on relationships. This means that the interpretation of a word adapts to its interactions within a community. Our realities are not the same. The regularity of spoken interpretation decides the eventual definition of a word. In this way, words live, evolve, and represent different meanings inside different communities.” This quote is from my prose essay, Nobody, Nowhere, USA.

So, working alongside the idea of how words evolve and have various meanings, I’ve chosen a few words that you will probably find in newspapers and journals: economy, circulation, movement, proposition, and record. I chose words with broad themes and multiple meanings that can become strangely intimate, given a personal context. I’d like us to take a few random pages, flip through them, find these words or their suggested themes, cut them out, and put them, unglued, on our page. This whole action should be quick and automatic. Don’t think, just do. Then, consider your selection and think about personal events and experiences related to these themes. Make the theme intimate and take notes. Think about the shape, the material, the blood, and the structure of ideas. Think about misrepresentation. How do these words live? What are the multiple realities of these themes? What is your role inside each reality? Examine these ideas through a microscope of personal experience. The themes are far-reaching, so you don’t need to be. Universality will happen naturally, so hone in. Hopefully, this exercise will spur a poem around your cut-up text and, after that, images.

Be well, everyone.

Love,

Gretchen