“The following book is a collection of ekphrastic short stories,
many very very brief, and written by a writer from the Philippines. Several
will be used for the workshop.”
—Fred Arroyo
November 28, 2015
Thus wrote the facilitator of the next PINTURA:PALABRA workshop, giving us a sense of some of the materials he'll be sharing with our workshop participants. What follows is what I'll call an informational interview in which Fred offers some thoughts on the gathering he'll be leading in Salt Lake City, UT--this time for writers who will be exploring ekphrastic prose.
*
LLB: Letras Latinas Blog
FA:
Fred Arroyo
LLB:
You recently spent a few days in Sacramento, CA,
visiting the Crocker Art Museum for three consecutive days, for several hours
each day. Will you share with our readers why?
FA:
The weekend of March 28-29, 2015,
I will be leading a creative writing
workshop, “Creative
Dialogues: A Workshop in Brief Ekphrastic Prose,” at the Utah Museum of Fine
Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah. The workshop is taking place in conjunction with
the exhibit Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. Drawn from
the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibit highlights
Latino artists and the rich, beautiful, and important contributions they’ve made to
American art and culture from the mid-20th century to the present,
and will travel across the United States until the Spring of 2017. Letras
Latinas has set in motion “PINTURA : PALABRA, a project in ekphrasis,” a
multi-year national initiative that seeks to enkindle new creative writing
inspired by Latino art, and, thus far, poetry workshops have taken place in
Washington, DC, Miami, and Sacramento. The next installment in the project will
be the workshop in brief ekphrastic prose in Salt Lake City.
Currently the exhibit is in
Sacramento, at the Crocker Museum, and I traveled there to engage with the
exhibit, have a sense of how the works are curated within a museum space, and
to view, read, imagine, and write from the exhibit as a form of practice,
process, and preparation for the workshop. I composed between 12 – 16
creative works (very brief fictions, prose poems, and essays) during my three
days, and these are works that I’m eager to return to and continue revising and refining. I
have to say that attending the exhibit was one of the more enriching and
productive experiences of creativity that I’ve experienced
in some time. The exhibit helped to affirm and provoke intuitions that have
shaped the stories I write. You feel a great sense of pride and gratitude
giving yourself to the exhibit, following the peoples, places, artistic choices
and forms as they begin to offer stories, connections, and differences that
Latino artists in the exhibit work with. You begin to see a shared history
emerging in a variety of forms and mediums, a new language connected and
different to Latino literary expression, and as you contend with these elements
of expression you begin to hear and see new images and locations of culture and
identity, and you begin to see and hear silences. And in those silences you
begin to imagine new forms of expression and representation that are needed within
our collective history, our literature and arts, and the communities we want to
inhabit.
LLB:
What has been the extent of your experience with
ekphrastic writing up until now, and how do you think this experience will help
you as move forward in designing and developing “Creative
Dialogues: A Workshop in Brief Ekphrastic Prose”?
FA:
Photographs, paintings, and objects
have always sparked my writing; they help me to begin inventing, clustering,
and collaging together various strands of a story. Often when I write, I have a
painting or photo that exists as in the background. The landscape itself in my
writing comes to life through a kind of ekphrastic moment. From my limited
study of the Greeks, ekphrasis—a description of
some place, artwork, or object—has
been a natural part of my writing process for some time.
The exhibit (and the preparation for
the workshop) is helping to extend and change how I envision the ekphrastic. I’m very intrigued
by the materiality or spirit of an artwork as it is brought to life in literary
writing. How to experience and create a real presence? In viewing the
exhibit Our America, I started to welcome more voices into the
ekphrastic, more versions of self and other, a more multilingual,
multigenerational, multicolored, or multi-lensed approach, where richer
possibilities of creativity and expression can arise in engaging with a work of
art. And I think this may be because the works in the exhibit have greater
power in relation to each other, rather than in their singularity, or
isolation. This isn’t
to suggest that I would deny the power of a single work. Instead, the artworks
in Our America collectively—in
pairings, in groupings, in creative dialogues—begin
to register and offer nuances and particulars that make for such a compelling presence
of art, and the silences that art makes us to listen to as well.
This is shaping the ekphrastic literary works we'll read before the workshop,
and as well as how we might approach the exhibit beyond the categories or
themes found in the exhibit, so workshop participants might envision how
different works—outside their
categories—offer
creative connections and dialogues.
LLB:
Will the workshop participants be asked to carry out
any tasks before the workshop?
FA:
There will be an anthology of
readings participants will need to read. They will include many different forms
of ekphrastic writing, as well as more craft or process-orientated writings
focused on writing brief prose. In addition, I want to offer readings that
return back to an original sense of the ekphrastic: a literary description of a
place, a work of art, or an object. In contemplating brief forms of writing
that emerge from the ekphrasis of a place or object, my sense is
that the ekphrastic dialogue with a work of art will be more particular and
imaginative. In the end, we’ll have specific texts to discuss, along with accompanying
artworks projected on a screen, have some craft or process language that helps
shape our discussions and our writings, and then have these readings and
discussions inform our workshops focused on our original creative writings.
Each participant will also need to
explore the online exhibit, http://www.americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/our_america/online_exhibition.cfm,
and then write three brief ekphrastic prose works (650 words or less) before
the workshop. Ideally, it would be great to distribute the works a few days
before our first workshop.
Each day will be divided between
discussion of works from the anthology, workshops of the participants’ writings, and a good space of time to
interact with the actual exhibit. Saturday’s workshops will
be of writings created before arriving in Salt Lake City, and Sunday’s workshop will
allow for writers to present both a revision and a new work. This will allow
for each writer to feel more confident and creative given how the workshop
unfolds, the more time they have with the actual exhibit, and as they
accumulate ideas, suggestions, and possibilities they want to bring to their
writing. Saturday will also be dedicated to focusing on heuristics—inventive prompts, guides, or
possibilities—for engaging and
discovering the ekphrastic. Sunday evening, after the workshop, we hope to have
a celebratory reading where workshop participants can share their writing.
LLB:
What will the post-workshop phase of the Salt Lake
City edition of PINTURA : PALABRA look like, both in terms of writing, and
publication(s).
FA:
I am very excited by the two-day
workshop at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the new brief ekphrastic prose that
will emerge from the workshop participants, and the future work of curating
these works for publication. The plan for now is to edit a portfolio of brief
nonfictions for the on-line journal Brevity. In addition, I would like to
also edit a portfolio of brief fictions and prose poems for another literary
journal, which is still in the works. Before publication, though, I’d like to create
an online post-workshop, where workshop participants will have a chance to go
home, consider there writing within a larger space of contemplation and
creativity, and revise or create new works to share with the group. This
on-line workshop can then provide more insights and possibilities into new
revision and accomplishment, so participants can send their work in for
possible publication in the portfolios. I see the space and time after the Salt
lake City workshop as a place to invent, revise, and refine, for each
participant to imagine more poetically what the ekphrastic can mean and offer
to Latino/a literary expression, and why that expression can become a vibrant
part of our communities.
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