Craft Seminar: Dissecting the Web: Writers Respond to Crisis with Susan Briante
Craft Seminar: Dissecting the Web: Writers Respond to Crisis with Susan Briante
2 Sessions: Thursdays, November 12 + 19
7:00-8:30pm ET
Susan Briante
Explore how your writing can respond to crisis with award-winning poet and essayist Susan Briante. Her most recent collection, 13 Questions for the Next Economy: New and Selected Works, is a finalist for the CLMP’s Firecracker Award in Poetry. Her book Defacing the Monument, essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program bringing students to the US-Mexico border to collaborate with community partners.
In a time of climate catastrophe, conflict, and economic precarity, writers turn to the page to document and process, to know what the poet Muriel Rukeyser described as “people today and the web in which they, suffering, find themselves.” How can we do justice to a wide range of injustices we might want to confront on the page? How can we respond to crisis without creating a spectacle of our own or another’s suffering?
In this two-session class, we’ll read the work of writers (including Rukeyser and contemporary authors such as Layli Long Soldier, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs) who have confronted past traumas and current challenges using different approaches and genres. We’ll consider the ethics of writing out of and through crisis as firsthand witnesses or researchers. We’ll interrogate our own goals, positions, and perspectives on the issues we want to address. Then we’ll craft a plan for moving forward with our projects across whatever genre we choose to write in.
Highlights:
Exploration of various approaches to writing through historical injustices, trauma, and crisis
Generative exercises to allow us to experiment with different craft tools and modes
Reflections to help us clarify and plan our writing goals
This class has 1 full and 1 partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Sunday, November 1.
Explore how your writing can respond to crisis with award-winning poet and essayist Susan Briante. Her most recent collection 13 Questions for the Next Economy: New and Selected Works is a finalist for the CLMP’s Firecracker Award in Poetry. Her book Defacing the Monument, essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “a superb examination of the ethical issues facing artists who tell others’ stories” and a “dazzlingly inventive and searching text.” Briante’s prose and poetry have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, among other nationally recognized venues. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program bringing students to the US-Mexico border to collaborate with community partners.
