Going Outside

As part of Wordfest, I'll be holding a workshop on writing from/with/about what we call "nature". Given the focus, I thought it'd be better to hold it outside rather than in a classroom, so we'll be meeting at UNCA's Botanical Gardens, at the northwest corner of the campus. If you'd be interested, drop a note to workshops@ashevillewordfest.org, or drop me a note at jeffbdavis at gmail.com.

Here's the description from the festival website:

In jazz, when a musician wants to change the color and feel of a composition, and move it into territory beyond the known and understood, he or she will often “go outside”, move out of the conventions of tonal structure for the piece, and transform it. It’s a mark, perhaps, of our alienation from our ecology, our oikos, home, that to speak authentically of the natural world, poets also must open up and move beyond the conventional tonal structures we find enshrined in the poetic canon. In this workshop, we’ll actually go out into the natural (if not quite wild) world to find ways to address the interaction of consciousness and world that move beyond metaphor, which too often just appropriates some apparent fact of the world as a trope of human rhetoric. We’ll look at things, feel them, smell them, dwell with them for a bit, and then try to speak for them – or from them. We’ll also look at poems by Ponge, Issa, Basho, and Rilke that have gone outside to help open our human eyes.

We'll get together Saturday the 26th, at 11:00 AM.