History

Summer Writing Progam 2004
Week Four: July 28—July 4

Course #: Non-credit: WRI 054, tuition: $375 per week
Course #: BA: WRI 454, undergraduate tuition: $856 per week
Course #: MFA: WRI 754, graduate tuition: $1,168 per week

Please Note: The tuition rates for credit students have changed. These tuition rates replace the old tuition rates listed in the SWP 2004 catalog and previously listed on this website. The tuition rate for non-credit students has not changed.

Please note that a new workshop by Reed Bye is now being offered.

Performance & Collaboration
This week will have Naropa University's Summer Writing Program's traditional focus on performance, collaboration and sangha. We'll look at how we work with one another in multi-genre zones - fusing writing with music, book arts, and other exploratory possibilities.

Text in Space/Book as Performance
Heather Akerberg
Generally a text is "performed" through a reader's voice. But can a book "perform" a text? In this hands-on workshop, we will use bookbinding techniques to create an object whose form performs the text and resides in the territory between book and Art.

Medium Crossing: Adapting prose and musicalizing poetry
Junior Burke
For prose writers wanting to hone their narrative skills via Dramatic forms. For poets looking to explore the marriage of words and music. For all writers who have an eye toward expanding their work in order to realize fresh possibilities. Everyone must bring in a piece of prose (original or otherwise), three to ten pages in length, as well as one to three poems (also original or not).

Spontaneous Speaking Poetics
Reed Bye
Beginning with sitting meditation to settle mind and body, we will move to simple sound exercises to awaken speech faculties where they may be slumbering. From there we will work with spontaneous verbal expression, feeling the sound and shape of what we say, paying less attention to the run of content. We will practice haiku and renga forms primarily, reading Basho, Buson, Kerouac and others, but move toward a more free-form finish.

Invisible Threads
Brenda Coultas
In this class we will focus on the development of a narrative thread capable of weaving together longer works. This class covers hybrid forms and story telling, and is for poetry and prose students.

Performance Sculptures and Adaptations
Michelle Ellsworth
In this workshop we will create original, relevant, and visually engaged performances works. We will pursue the aesthetic and social possibilities of solo performance, performance sculptures, and adaptations. With increased reverence and resentment for our artistic fore parents and carpenters we will explore adapting and building performance pieces.

Time, Matter, Mind
Thalia Field
An interdisciplinary workshop exploring literary, artistic or dramatic uses of time-based, procedural, indeterminate and collaborative processes. We will discuss examples of and issues involved in alternatives to print publication and many of the assumptions of book and screen culture. We will also explore the limits of non-traditional materials and contemplative creative process in creating work for "publication" and performance.

The Voice of the Bard
Lisa Jarnot
We will look at the conjunctions of western literature and performance poetry-- observing the methods of contemporary writers who bring traditional verse (Blake, Scottish border ballads, Matthew Arnold) into energetic performative forms (from the ballads of Allen Ginsberg and Helen Adam to the rock songs of the Fugs).

Taking It To The Stage
Bobbie Louise Hawkins
We will work on writing text toward performance, and on simple points of "stagecraft" (mike technique, readable text, entering and leaving the stage in character, and more). The main focus will be writing. The staging issues will be "de-mystifying" what reading one's own work entails. In this class we will work toward a text that can be given a "staged reading".

Borders: Where the Moment Counts
Joanne Kyger
Borders: where the moment counts, where languages blend, cultures merge, the strange becomes familiar, and vice versa. Borderlines of thoughts, sexuality, religions-on the edge, over the line, outrageous and invisible. Poets who push these limits and investigate new territory are as various as Allen Ginsberg, Franco Beltrametti, Robert Duncan, Lorine Niedecker and Etel Adnan. We will read examples from these poets, among others, and respond by talking and writing in class.

Printing Workshop
Ken Mikolowski
Well, since this is a printing workshop I suppose we'll do some printing. And maybe learn to hand-set some type as well. Let's add a bit about artists and writers collaborating in the print area. Along the way we'll be getting our hands dirty too. That's always a good idea for poets.

The Visible Unseen: Public Discourse and Publics
Akilah Oliver
We will explore the connections and tensions between the visible and the unseen world/s. Through engaging with text, public spaces, the imagination, soundscapes and eros, we will work towards a collaborative project that springs from the sensibilities of the participants. Our goal is to process a discourse which re-imagines the public and the sublime (or sacred) as open visitation spaces. Prose writers, performance artists, poets, musicians, and visual artists are all invited to participate in our mini-collaborative.

Song Writing Workshop
Steven Taylor
The workshop is part historical survey, part lyric factory, part band. The first two class sessions are devoted to listening to and discussing various forms and genres in English language song from the Renaissance to the present. By the third session we all have a song to contribute to the ensemble. The third and fourth sessions are devoted to arranging and rehearsing a program of songs to be performed for the larger community at the end of the week. You don't need to be able to read music, but you must be willing to sing. If you have an instrument, bring it.

Genre Crossing
Wang Ping
Poems, prose poems, stories, personal essays, memoirs are never just islands in the ocean of words. It is our job, as writers and poets, to build bridges to cross, to borrow crafts and voices from different genres in order to express ourselves more effectively, more refreshingly, more powerfully. This workshop, "Crossing Genres," is designed for writers who move between poems and stories. We will explore different forms and modes of expression in poetry and prose, and experiment with combining fragments of mixed genres. Through such a fusion of different voices, styles and crafts, we hope to expand our horizons and venture into new territories where raw materials are transformed into original, artistic voices, where form and content work in harmony.

Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2006
2005
2004
2003