Writing Workshop #35: Emerging From
March 15, 2021
An update from our thirty-fifth Writing Workshop!
A summary of the workshop held on Saturday March 6, plus some of the output published below
This week William talked about the different ways of looking at characters who are emerging from something. We considered the opening words of the King James Bible, and the possible narratives of emergence in Caspar David Friedrich s mysterious painting
The Wanderer, looking out from a mountaintop over a misty valley and peaks below. We considered the emergence of involuntary memory Marcel Proust s famous madeleine moment, watched a clip from a movie version of Jane Austen s
An update from our thirty-first Writing Workshop (and the first of 2021)!
A summary of the workshop held on Saturday January 23, plus some of the output published below
To start our first season of classes in 2021, William focused on the idea of chance: the idea–or even the fact–that life and art is filled with twists and turns, and we don t know the whole story until it s over. He used several examples from the work of composer John Cage to explore the idea of chance in composition, the idea that the composer decides on a range of permutations that the performers and audience then use to produce the piece. Similarly, he talked about change ringing, the British tradition of church bell-ringing in repeating yet varied patterns, where mathematics chooses the notes, but the musicians choose how the pattern is heard and Maddie (piano) and William (clarinet) played some patterns. We developed some random word lists, and a numeric system for choosing 6 at random from them, and then e