Past Events

Laura Kasischke has published four novels (most recently, Be Mine, Harcourt, 2007), six collections of poetry (most recently Gardening In the Dark, Ausable 2004), and a novel for young adults. She has published writing in Ploughshares, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The New England Review, and elsewhere, and been the recipient of several Pushcart Prizes and two fellowships for the National Endowment for the Arts. Her third novel is being made into a film starring Uma Thurman, directed by Vadim Perelman. She teaches at the University of Michigan.

Workshop: Stepping into the Scene: How to Write with the Full Imagination

Some writing experiences are a flash of intensity, a peak experience, translated into language. This workshop, through a series of exercises and assignments, will attempt to explore ways in which the act of writing can be as vivid and living as a physical experience. By experimenting with writing processes, and discussing the mechanics of the "scene," we'll see how the writing experience is one that can fuse reality and dream, life and death, logic and illogic in ways that precisely render the experience we have of ourselves as both physical and time-bound beings; as beings existing in a psychological and spiritual realm that seems to have no barriers or laws. Literature can create a space between those places where “the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and incommunicable...cease to be perceived as contradictions...” (Andre Breton). My hope is that you will learn some new approaches to the writing process that will result in some new work to take away with you from the conference.

Laura Kasischke on the Web