Dr. Emily Carr will host a healings writing workshop that explores the role of language in liberation movements.
February 17, 2021 @ 2:00 PM PST / 5:00 PM EST
Dr. Emily Carr was the program director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Oregon State University-Cascades. Emily’s fourth book, Name Your Bird Without A Gun: a Tarot Romance, was published by Spork in 2019. Recent literary magazine publications include poems in Prairie Schooner, So To Speak, and the Tampa Review and an essay in The American Poetry Review.
Free
In this writing salon, we’ll explore ways to creatively process what you’ve learned in the other Black History Month events you’ve attended, express feelings (like anger, rage, grief, fear, and anxiety) that make you feel uncomfortable, and use language as a tool for resistance.
In a lecture at the Free University in Berlin in April 1984 , to her seminar on Black Women’s Poetry, Audre Lorde once argued that: Poetry is perhaps the most subversive form of art there is because it intends to bring about change. Change in the deepest sense, which is concerned with feelings. Poetry comes out of feelings. It works with feelings, and it alters the very essence of our lives. Anything less than that is not poetry… Poetry helps bring shape to our visions of the future. Whether our visions agree is less important than us having a concept. If we are to have a concept, it must be of something that has not yet been, because obviously what we have has not gotten us very far. We are in the most dangerous times in human history, so there must be another way. Poetry begins to construct paths out of our dreams and hopes, out of our fears.
Together, we’ll talk about strategies for constructing paths out of our dreams and hopes, out of our fears. We’ll share our visions of the future, and explore tools for shaping those visions on the page, as well as ways language can help us to bring about change in the deepest sense, which starts with our deepest feelings.
This salon is open to writers of all levels and experience; it is also open to folks who don’t self-identify as writers and who are curious about the ways language can nourish their endeavors both on and off the page. I’ll offer guided writing exercises and we’ll spend some time writing together and talking about our writing. Sharing is encouraged but optional; I welcome all forms of participation, even and especially listening.
