Jeff Davis Reading/Workshop on Campus

Jeff Davis will be on campus March 5-7 to offer the below workshop and to read on Thursday afternoon. The workshop is open to MFA students, MFA graduates, Writing Dept. undergraduates, and Writing Dept./MFA faculty, but there is a cap of 12 participants--so reserve your seat soon! To reserve a seat, email or call Brian (Laurel is on vacation, so don't contact her). Please note the Feb. 24 deadline for submission of work.

EAR IN THE PALM: WRITING WITH COMPASSION & EMPATHY

a multi-genre writing workshop with JEFFREY DAVIS

Compassion is, in part, that capacity to hear the cries of the world, to feel them in our skin as our own, and to respond accordingly. In their Nobel Prize Acceptance Speeches, Faulkner and Steinbeck each claim that the writer’s charge is to write about, among other verities, humanity’s capacity for compassion. But what is the impetus for any writer – poet, memoirist, novelist – not only to write about compassion but to write with it? How does a writer “practice” it?

This two-day workshop begins with the premise that much mature, compelling writing stems from a writer’s capacity to write with compassion and empathy – both to know her own interior self intimately as well as to imagine and feel reality and consciousness beyond a personally constructed selfhood and worldview. On Thursday evening, we will explore voices of yearning and suffering as ways to embody and give voice to “difficult” characters and personas. Participants will be encouraged to assimilate the evening’s study to prepare for Saturday morning. On Saturday morning, we will consider how we can embody socially “unheard” voices as well as voice that which is more-than-human. We also will practice listening and responding to one another’s writings with two complementary qualities – compassion and truthfulness. The workshop is part discussion hovering around student-writers’ challenges and projects as well as around readings in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that Jeff will choose; part exercise and writing generation; and part discussion of students’ writings. Selected readings might come from the work of Robert Olen Butler, Patricia Smith, Jeanette Walls, Barbara Kingsolver, Adrienne Rich, Faulkner, Sam Shepherd, and others.

Participants are invited but not required to submit up to eight double-spaced pages of writing to Jeff (email: kymtkv@gmail.com) by February 24 along with a note clarifying why this selection has been submitted. This writing might reflect a student-writer’s challenges in voicing one’s “self” in poetry or portraying characters based on one’s self in prose; challenges in creating compelling characters whether “good, bad, or difficult and depraved;” or another challenge related to the workshop’s topic. Jeff will respond to each submission and may draw upon these writings as part of the workshop’s flow.

Perhaps by workshop’s end, student-writers will come away with a keener sense of how to practice writing with compassion and why doing so matters. For a writer to hear the cries of the world is, in a sense, to have an ear in the palm.