This virtual workshop at Center for Book Arts takes place across two sessions on Saturdays, October 28 and November 4, from 1:00-3:00pm.
Complete schedule:
- Saturday, Oct 28, 1:00-3:00pm
- Saturday, Nov 4, 1:00-3:00pm
Registration closes on October 21, 2023 at 11:59pm.
This virtual class at Center for Book Arts is taught by instructor Sheryda Warrener.
What formal and poetic possibility lies dormant in things saved or collected? In this two-part virtual workshop, we’ll explore our own personal archives as sites of potential creative content. Participants will generate a sequence of poems and devise concepts for an artists' book in relationship to this content. In advance of the session, participants will gather their physical collections, e.g. perfume bottles, to-do lists, sheep figurines, guitar picks, receipts, haunted objects, marginalia in books, wooden tops, maps, postcards, etc. Online, we’ll share archives with one another, and we’ll look at the work of artist-writers who draw on this archival impulse: Etel Adnan, Mary Ruefle, Jenny Odell, Yuji Agematsu, and Bhanu Kapil. Guided by practices of attention and slow-looking strategies using the collection as a visual prompt, participants will generate a six-part poetic sequence. The option to sign up for a one-on-one meeting with Sheryda to receive feedback on the work in progress will be available between sessions.
Required Materials:
About the Instructor
Sheryda Warrener is a poet and award-winning teacher. She is the author of the poetry collections Hard Feelings (Invisible, 2010), Floating Is Everything (Nightwood, 2015), and Test Piece, forthcoming from Coach House Books this fall. You can read her work in literary journals online and in print in the Believer, Puritan, The Malahat Review, and others, and in the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry in English 2018, and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. She lives on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations, where she is a lecturer in poetry and interdisciplinary forms in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. All images courtesy of the instructor.Explore your personal archive as a site for potential creative content.