Workshop 7: Chen and Rachel

This week's workshop was centered on the idea of space, the expansive or restrictive inner space of a house and the memories associated with buildings and homes.

We brought in two reading selections: an excerpt from Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" and from Margeurite Duras' "Writing."

The entire text of the "Invisible Cities" can be found here.

Calvino's excerpt was on a city of the dead, very image driven and somewhat nonpersonal, an intellectual exercise. Duras' is much more personal, about her experience as a writer and how space (the interior of a house, the surrounding grounds) affects her writing habits.

For introductions I asked for the women's names, per usual, and a vivid memory of a space they used to inhabit. This actually turned into a very long and wonderful discussion about people's pasts, the houses they used to live in. One woman mentioned how she always used to seek out the basement as her private space, and someone else said that for her, that place was in a tree. The discussion evolved into memories of grandparents, death, and ghosts.

We then went on to read the excerpts, and no one had much to say about them, some were eager to start writing.

The writing prompt is as follows:

For prompt 1 I gave them printouts from this website of rural ruins:
http://community.livejournal.com/rural_ruin/

1. Based on your picture of an abandoned home, imagine what the home looked like fifty years ago (or when it was newly built). Who lived in it? What did it smell like, feel like, upon walking in? You may want to describe it very specifically, going from a view of its outside and then continuing inside, taking us on a "tour." The picture is only a starting off point; you can imagine the inside of the house to be anything you'd like it to be.

And then for prompt 2,

2. Remember the first place you ever lived? Look out of one of the windows of that building. What do you see? (What you see can either be what it looked like back then, or now). If you are illustrating, use the frame of the postcard paper as the frame of the house: that is, fill in the whole card with what you see.


I think that because of the beginning discussion, people really wanted to write about their own homes, so for prompt 1 it was less about looking at a random ruin and imagining, and more about describing a memory. I gave two prompts because there was a visual element to it and one of the women, who didn't speak English very well, ended up copying a drawing. She also composed a poem in her head and then read it aloud to us from memory.

Rachel brought up a good point about the structure of workshops because of how well the discussion went. How much of class should be discussion and how much reading and writing? It's hard to say... sometimes when a discussion is going really well, I'm hesitant to curb it and move on to the next activity. When it came to the writing itself, Rachel thought that people didn't write with the same openness as they had when they were speaking. had they exhausted what they had to say? Was the page a more daunting place to put down words than in a "storytelling" group discussion?