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Writer as Reader

Writer as Reader: Discovering New Ways into the Text

October 25, 2024
9:30 am – 4:00 pm

Writer as Reader workshops model writing practices that inspire students to read more carefully, grasp meaning in complex texts, and build understanding through collaboration. These workshops invite secondary and college teachers to consider “writing to read” as a central classroom practice. Using diverse writing-to-read strategies, workshop participants explore their individual perspectives, consider what is apparent and what is inferred, and attend to the questions posed by the text.

This year, IWT’s Writer as Reader workshops will be held on Friday, October 25, 2024 on campus at Bard College. The reading lists feature novels, poetry, nonfiction, historical documents, plays, and parables. Each workshop will highlight 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. 

IWT can also bring a Writer as Reader workshop to your school. If you are interested, please contact Deputy Director Michelle Hoffman (845-758-7432 or [email protected]) or Project Manager Rebecca Chace (845-758-7544 or [email protected]).

2024 Workshop Descriptions

Beyond Caste: Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” 

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village”

In “Stranger in the Village” (1953), James Baldwin relates his experience as the only Black person in a secluded Swiss village. From this vantage point, high in the Swiss Alps, Baldwin reevaluates his place in the American racial and economic caste system. Expanding on Baldwin’s insights, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste (2020) delves into how societies make hierarchies and offers parallels between anti-Black racism in America, policies aimed at the systematic annihilation of Jews in Nazi Germany, and the caste system in India. In this elegantly braided historical work, Wilkerson writes with remarkable moral vision, challenging us to see the origins of caste and its many manifestations. The workshop will use IWT writing practices to explore these two texts and consider how they resonate in our schools and classrooms so that we might begin to imagine a world without caste.

Texts: Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village”

The Same River Twice: The Power of Perspective in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Percival Everett’s James

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Percival Everett, James

“All modern American literature,” Ernest Hemingway wrote, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” The book has been surrounded by controversy since its release—Is it racist? Is it antiracist?—and has remained on the American Library Association’s list of most frequently banned books over the last three decades. In his widely acclaimed new novel, James, Percival Everett reorients the story by presenting it through the perspective not of Huck but of Jim—now called James. Through an exploration of shared moments in the two books, we will delve into the complexities of identity and consider the significance of names and roles, especially for an enslaved person. We will also explore how narrative point of view shapes our understanding of both the characters and ourselves as readers. Considerations for the classroom will extend into the difference between having one’s story told by another as opposed to telling it oneself.

Texts: Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Percival Everett, James

Demons, Lovers, Murderers: The Sensational Poetics of the Ballad

Francis James Child (ed.), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads; John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs (selections provided)

A young wife turns into a werewolf and takes revenge on her aged husband. A handsome lost love steals away with a former mistress, who spies his cloven hoof too late. Crows taunt a corpse, a crucifix speaks, and a precocious baby becomes a steel-driving man. Dying queens, demon lovers, mad mothers, heroic sailors . . . traditional ballads and their literary imitations, rooted in story and often sensational, can be an exciting way into poetry for the verse-averse. With so many variants across geographies, time, and languages, ballads are equally rewarding to teachers, scholars, and poets. This workshop will invite participants into a day of close listening and close reading. We will explore how aurality—recordings, voice, and music—can help our students engage with poetry beyond the printed page. In addition to classical examples, we will take up modern remakes of the ballad to understand how this traditional form remains relevant. We will spend time with such balladeers as Bob Dylan, Helen Adam, Margaret Walker, and Texas Gladden.

Texts: Francis James Child (ed.), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads; John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs (selections provided) 

Renovating West Egg: Re-Worlding Gatsby through Contemporary Culture (Additional spots now available!)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Taylor Swift, “The Last Great American Dynasty” and “Happiness”; Rod Wave, Nostalgia

In this workshop, we will “re-world” The Great Gatsby by drawing connections to current popular music and highlighting the novel’s modernist aesthetics for contemporary readers. We will explore and appreciate the novel’s ornate language while grappling with the stark reality of wealth and inequality. Songs like Taylor Swift’s “The Last Great American Dynasty” and “Happiness” will serve as audio texts that shed light on peripheral characters in the novel. We will also examine music from hip hop and R&B, such as Rod Wave’s album Nostalgia, to identify how the novel’s signifiers of class and race intersect with the modern-day reader’s experiences. By emphasizing moments of intertextuality, this workshop encourages teachers to contemporize the cultural and political spheres that The Great Gatsby inhabits. We may discover that the novel’s style resonates with our modern sensibilities in ways we never expected.

Texts: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Taylor Swift, “The Last Great American Dynasty” and “Happiness”; Rod Wave, Nostalgia

Frankenstein, AI, and Other Cyborgs (Waitlist only; this workshop is full)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (selections)

When generative AI dominates the news and Poor Things is winning Oscars, it’s time to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—the archetypal tale of creative overreach—once again. Participants in this workshop will collaborate with each other and with AI writing programs to explore the novel and to think about how reading, writing, teaching, and learning are all acts of creation. Using the tools and practices of writing-based teaching, we will consider generative AI as a disruptive technology that stands in company with Frankenstein’s creature—famously more human than its creator, and more complex than anything AI has dreamed up so far.

Texts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (selections)

Open Borders: Latin American Poetry in Translation

Raúl Zurita and Forrest Gander (eds.), Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America; Cecilia Vicuña, selected poems (provided)

From Gabriela Mistral to Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo to Ernesto Cardenal and Alejandra Pizarnik, Spanish-language poetry has been flourishing in the Americas. Reading Latin American poets through various methods of inquiry and analysis, we can introduce students across cultures and languages to worlds different from but similar to their own. Through close reading and writing-to-read practices, teachers will learn how to engage students in dynamic inquiry into image, sound, and form in poetry. We will explore the ways in which the multicultural experience can be integrated into the classroom while deepening students’ understanding of the immigrant and the “foreigner” in contemporary culture. The workshop will also touch upon different approaches of how to work with poetry in translation. Knowledge of Spanish is not necessary, as we will attempt to incorporate these poets into an English-based classroom. The aim will be to understand, through multiple methods of inquiry and analysis, the ways in which we translate experience into language.

Texts: Raúl Zurita and Forrest Gander (eds.), Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America; Cecilia Vicuña, selected poems (provided)

What Is My Pack? Identity and Belonging in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Karen Russell, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” (provided)

Alison Bechdel’s award-winning graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic explores Bechdel’s complex relationship with her father, a closeted high school English teacher and funeral home director who led a secret life as a gay man. In the title story of the best-selling St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, author Karen Russell imagines an institution where children raised as animals are instructed, coaxed, and bullied into an ambiguous humanity. Through close reading of comic panels and reflection on genre, this workshop explores multimodal literacy as well as multiple models of identity—queer, artistic, lupine, and human. On a deeper level, we will explore whether identity is something we inherit, choose, or have imposed on us by others.

Texts: Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Karen Russell, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” (provided)

Radical Experiments in Genre: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans; Matthew R. Kay, Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom (selections provided)

A series of creative nonfiction essays set in six American cities, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans blends memoir, research, reporting, and other forms of literary revisioning to tell the stories of the undocumented subjects she interviews as well as members of her own family. Participants will examine how Villavicencio’s experiments with genre and form both restore humanity to her subjects and encourage readers to see themselves in their stories. Matthew R. Kay’s Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom offers strategies for grappling with the discomfort that can emerge in our students and ourselves as we encounter the grief and blistering humor in Villavicencio’s text. We will experiment with her methods together, performing radical experiments in genre by crafting writing prompts to support and sustain our classroom communities as we tackle challenging material that overturns foundational myths about what it means to be American.

Texts: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans; Matthew R. Kay, Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom (selections provided)

“What are you? What would you?”: Performing the Self in Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Are you a comedian?” Olivia asks Viola in act 1 of Twelfth Night. “No, my profound heart,” replies Viola, “and yet by the very fangs of malice, I swear, I am not that I play.” Who is what they play? Written in the same year as Hamlet (perhaps in tandem), Twelfth Night resonates with the concerns of today: class tensions, gender identity, sexual orientation, narcissism, isolation, and the treachery of language. To make her way in a new country, the shipwrecked Viola disguises herself as a man and presents herself at court. In short order, everyone falls in love with this woman in man’s clothing. Mayhem ensues—a mayhem that transforms Illyria from a barren land of self-absorption into a lively, generative space. Our classrooms, too! Using both IWT writing practices and acting games from the Globe Theatre, we will bring the play to life in our bodies, minds, and hearts as we dwell with these characters in the topsy-turvy world of this irresistible comedy. You, too, may fall in love.

Text: William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

The Missed Lands: Shaun Tan’s The Arrival and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (this workshop is canceled for 2024)

Shaun Tan, The Arrival; Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote, “If home is found on both sides of the globe, / home is of course here—and always a missed land.” In this workshop, we will put Shaun Tan’s graphic novel, The Arrival, in conversation with selections from Italo Calvino’s classic Invisible Cities as we focus on the “cities” of memory and desire and explore the precarious ways that memories of lost homelands can be transposed upon a new land, a new home. The Arrival provides a fantastical, wordless saga of immigration converging on an alternative America where people encounter origami birds and hissing dragons. Inspired by Tan’s illustrations, we will create our own narratives of departure and arrival while modeling ways to discover points of connection between images and narratives. Along the way, we will explore some of Tan’s visual inspirations, which range from Vittorio De Sica’s film The Bicycle Thief to Australian coral reefs. Writing together, we’ll explore the narratives we create when we, as poet Richard Blanco wrote, “love a country as if [we’ve] lost one.” The practices in this workshop can be adapted to both middle and high school classrooms.

Texts: Shaun Tan, The Arrival; Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Registration and Fees

  • Tuition
    Fee: $625
     
    Early-Bird Fee: $550
    The Early-Bird deadline is September 27, 2024. Tuition must be paid in full prior to the workshop.

    Group Discount Fee: $562.50
    10 percent discount for groups of three or more teachers from the same school.

    Early-Bird Group Discount Fee: $495
    10 percent discount for teams of three or more teachers from the same school. All must register by September 27, 2024; tuition must be paid in full prior to the workshop.

    Cancellation policy. No refunds will be issued for cancellations made later than one week before the workshops.
  • Credit and Scholarship Opportunities
    CTLE Credit
    All Bard IWT workshops are Continuing Teacher and Leader Education approved in New York State. A Writer as Reader workshop is 5 CTLE hours. 

    The Teresa Vilardi Scholarship
    IWT welcomes scholarship applications from those studying to become teachers (i.e., those registered in Bard’s MAT Program or another accredited undergraduate or graduate program in education) and in-service teachers with limited professional development funds.

Hear it from our participants

“Thank you for the delight and the joy. Getting to linger in questions and play was rejuvenating!”

—2023 Writer as Reader participant

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Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking/Bard College.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking and Writing and Thinking are Trademarks of Bard College.
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