Sentence Workshop with Alexis Almeida (Seminar)
$ 75.00
SENTENCE WORKSHOP
with Alexis Almeida
A one-day workshop held at the UDP studio at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
Saturday, October 5, 2019
12pm to 4pm
In her introduction to Prose Architectures, Renee Gladman writes: “But to progress in language (in sentences) is to move forward through a kind of syntax we’ve all agreed upon… However, this “making sense” wasn’t actually a representation of how what I wrote came to me or existed in me.” In his afterword to Gladman's book, Fred Moten describes her work as “fugitive in entanglement” and her sentences as having “neither beginning nor end but [moving] in a kind of parabolic orbit, an irregularity of swerves and rises.” Moten asks, “Now, can we renew infection, insubordination, in the sentence?”
In this intimate workshop, through the work of writers, filmmakers and visual artists such as Aase Berg, Renee Gladman, Sade LaNay, Marosa Di Giorgio, Gordon Matta-Clark, Zahra Patterson, Jonas Mekas, Etel Adnan, Anna Moschovakis, and others, we’ll look at sentences that favor music, architecture, movement, “anarchic shifting of ground” over semantic climax and closure; we’ll look at how meaning is built from syntax and how syntax is pulled from structures in cities, and grammars, how shifts between the hypo and paratactic modes can create thresholds, or stretched relationships between subjects and objects, how an ambiguous conjunction can create spaciousness in the sentence, and how sentences can be transposed across mediums, constantly posing new ways of imagining time and space.
All are welcome for some generative writing, reading, and workshopping specific sentences from manuscripts in progress.
Alexis Almeida grew up in Chicago. She is the author of I Have Never Been Able to Sing (UDP, 2018), and most recently the translator of Dalia Rosetti's Dreams and Nightmares (Les Figues, 2018) and Marina Yuszczuk's Single Mother (Spork, 2019). She teaches at the Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library and runs 18 Owls Press.
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