Our Workshops

Writer as Reader Workshops

My imagination is nourished by old books, old bones, fossils, feathers, paintings, photographs, museums of every kind and size…I like to learn things and…all this information feeds my fiction.        --Andrea Barrett

Toni Morrison is arguably one of the finest American writers publishing today. In her latest novel, A Mercy, she has said she had to “summon order out of disorder” to write the novel. The historical record and texts which were crucial to her imagining of the earliest years in this nation’s history documented Native American genocide; indentured servitude; and the radically altered physical environment due to white settlement. From her research, Morrison invented the characters Florens, Sir, Lina, and Sorrow, each of whom lives and embodies crucial aspects of Morrison’s historical research. Set in 1690 and moving through subsequent decades, A Mercy relies on the information contained in historical documents and scholarship to build its narrative. While A Mercy will be our core text, we will also consider historical documents that Morrison employs, including William Cronon’s Changes in the Land. Cronon documents how the settling of North America altered the landscape in profound and irrevocable ways for both humans and the environment. Morrison pins much of her plot on these sweeping changes (and the people who were charged with making them: slaves and indentured servants) in order to tell this story of dislocation, love, the refusal of love and human connection. This workshop will examine the potential for overwhelm in reading the historical record, even as what we find there might yield riches for writing and thinking. Questions we’ll pursue: Where do stories come from? And what impact does researching history have on their (and our) writing?

Text: Toni Morrison, A Mercy, New York: Knopf, 2008. ISBN 978-0-307-26423