The Virginia G. Piper
Center for Creative Writing

In this workshop, we will use doodling as a foundation for creating visual hybrid form poetry/prose. Rebecca will briefly show examples of visual hybrid work and introduce/demonstrate doodling methods. Then, offering writing and doodling prompts, Rebecca will help guide participants in the creation of visual poetry/prose. Participants will be encouraged to begin to explore the wonderful and vast cosmos of doodles from where they are, so no formal art training is necessary to engage in making doodle poems or creating micro doodle essays. There are no gatekeepers in the Doodleverse!

What haunts you in your writing or art? When was the last time you received a letter in the mail that wasn’t from your internet company? The last time you wrote one? These days, letters can come in many forms from a physical letter to an email or text to a stamped potato (yes, you can send potatoes!). And the things that haunt us, whether we are avoiding them or ruminating over them obsessively, come in even more forms.  

We bring where we come from when we travel. In this workshop, participants will reflect on writing about familiar and unfamiliar landscapes, and practice making place a character in their writing.

How can poetics serve our most socially urgent writing? Writing about race [for example] is a polemic,” writes Cathy Park Hong, “but also a lyric, in that our inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions.” To investigate this convergence, this course explores the creative nonfiction resistance essay. We will read contemporary works by Aisha Sabatini Sloan, José Orduña, Sarah de Leeuw, and Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas—and, in honor the essay’s genre-defying roots, we will also read hybrid/fluid/genre-contested works by writers such as Tommy Pico and Claudia Rankine.