Alumni Workshop: Writing from the Holy Imagination with Dorothea Lasky

In this intensive, five-day workshop, we will explore the how the invisible world can be used as a place of inspiration for our writing. We will discuss writing and art that engages with the occult and contains spiritual resonances that cannot be defined neatly into a rational or linear understanding of the universe. In doing so, we will resist the idea that writing must fit into predetermined emotional, imagistic, or narrative trajectories and begin to expand our own work into the realm of the holy imagination. The holy imagination can be defined as a cognitive space that could be conceived as a sort of afterworld, but in our class, we will begin to think of it as wholly part of this living world. We will read work by Bhanu Kapil, Nathaniel Mackey, Laura Riding Jackson, Sun Ra, Renee Gladman, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, H.D., Shirley Jackson, Eliphas Levi, and Mya Spalter, watch films by Stanley Kubrick, Jennifer Kent, David Lynch, Dario Argento, and make our own tarot cards (and write from them). We will visit so-called magical places around Bennington, such as the Bennington Triangle, Jennings Music Library, Booth dormitory as well ake a Shirley Jackson walking tour, and have a séance/writing ritual in a clearing in a forest. Through all of these experiences, we will consider the idea of elegy and how to use the elegiac form as a kind of foil to a new experience of art that neither mourns or celebrates a spiritual landscape, and instead makes the spiritual world fair game in thinking about writing about existence.

This workshop is for writers of all genres, although many of the readings and exercises will be poetry-focused.

Enrollment deadline: May 30 (15 student maximum enrollment)

Tuition: $1,200

Payment: $200 non-refundable deposit to register, balance owed by May 30, 2019

Details

Dates of Workshop: June 13-17, 2019  |  Location: Bennington College campus

• Includes tuition, plus room and board for four nights/five days
• Housing is dormitory-style, single room on the Bennington College campus
• Dining is at the Student Center
• Participants may attend all Writing Seminars events
• Quiet writing time or off-campus dinner/activities are on your own at your discretion
• Lunches during museum visits are on your own              
• It is recommended participants provide their own transportation
• Van service/carpooling may be available for travel during workshops

Workshop Schedule (subject to change):

About Dorothea Lasky

Dorothea Lasky is the author of six full-length collections of poetry and prose, most recently Animal, coming out this fall from Wave Books, as well as Milk, Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE, all also out from Wave Books, and Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton).  She is also the author of numerous chapbooks, including Snakes (Tungsten Press) and Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse). She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's) and was a 2013 Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry. Along with the poet Alex Dimitrov, she is the co-creator of @poetastrologers, a popular astrological Twitter account and for which she co-writes two monthly astrological columns for W Magazine and a 21st century astrology primer is due out from Flatiron Books in the fall of 2019.  She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania, is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the Arts in Education program at Harvard University, and did her undergraduate studies at Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts, where she directs the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program and organizes the summer writing classes, as well as serves as co-Faculty Advisor for Columbia Artist/Teachers.