Institute for Writing and Thinking Presents

IWT Writer as Reader Workshops

This year, IWT’s Writer as Reader workshops will be held on Friday, November 4, 2022. The lineup features novels, poetry, nonfiction, historical documents, plays, letters, and more. Each workshop will highlight writing-to-read strategies that foster close reading and help readers develop an appreciation for the connections between different but related texts. Writer as Reader workshops emphasize the pedagogical value of teaching texts that are unfamiliar to students, prompting them to read closely and critically, with attentiveness and an open mind. 

These workshops offer opportunities for critical reading and discussion, while modeling writing and reading activities that can focus class discussion, help students engage with difficult material, and emphasize the social character of all learning.

Workshop offerings:

1. Writing to Read Beloved
Toni Morrison, Beloved; Charles W. Chesnutt, “Po’ Sandy”; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (excerpts)

2. “To Make Real the Promise of Democracy:” Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau on Citizenship and Civil Disobedience
Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; Henry David Thoreau, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”

 3. Oedipus and Tiresias: Performing Status and Sexuality
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (trans. Ellen McLaughlin); Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours; selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers

4. The Radical Power of the Partial Perspective: Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Brian Dillon’s Essayism
Brian Dillon, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction; Valeria Luiselli Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

5. The Cannibal, the Witch, and the Colonizers: Shakespeare’s The Tempest Historicized
 William Shakespeare, The Tempest; selections from James Baldwin, Aimé Césaire, Jamaica Kincaid, Michel Montaigne, and Jimmie Durham (provided).

 6. Listening to N.K. Jemisin and Janelle Monáe: Writing and the Arts of Change
N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season; music videos by Janelle Monáe. 

7. Mapping Elizabeth Bishop: The Poetics of Geography
Selected poems by Elizabeth Bishop; selected maps from the Library of Congress online archives.
 
8. Sentience, Loss, and Empathy in Klara and the Sun 
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun; Loren Eiseley, “The Bird and the Machine”; Adam Gopnik, “Death of a Fish” 
 
9. Love in a Time of Terror: Connection and Recognition in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned 
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time; Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

10. Telling Our Stories: Building Bridges Through Language, Image, and Form
Trung Le Nguyen, The Magic Fish; Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

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For more information, call 845-752-4516, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://iwt.bard.edu/workshops/writer-as-reader/.

Time: 9:30 am – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Humanities Building

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