VIRIDITAS: Writing Workshop with Farnoosh Fathi (Seminar)
$ 65.00
Viriditas, Thinking Like a Plant, or This World I Live In
with Farnoosh Fathi
A one-day seminar and workshop held at the UDP studio at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
Saturday, June 23, 2018
12pm to 4pm
Search out thy blindness, it holdeth riches past computing.
– Helen Keller
How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?
– William Blake
What is darkness? What is blindness?
What are their ev’ry riches and immensities?
Hildegard von Bingen wrote, “We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.” This is the purpose of our seminar, which will function as a creative meditation on how we relate to our own sensory receptivity. Our work will be to create, combine and consider our attention, with the goal of seeing how varieties of “blindness” support (or occlude) our freedom from the known. And, how a surrendering muscle, rather than the forced determination toward a particular outcome, can be the real work of writing.
Readings will form a base for our own meditation, drawing from by Helen Keller’s This World I Live In, Christine Hume’s Hum, Craig Holdredge’s Thinking Like a Plant, Joan Murray’s Drafts, Fragments, Poems, as well as teachings of J. Krishnamurti, St. Francis, Eihei Dogen, Corita Kent, and Hildegard von Bingen.
Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Great Guns (Canarium, 2013), editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB Poets, 2018), and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives in New York City, where she has recently taught at Poets House, Columbia University, and the Poetry Project.