Writer as Reader

Feed My Frankenstein

Mary Shelley famously referred to Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus as “my hideous progeny.” Has any canonical English text spawned a larger, more divergent, or more bizarre variety of adaptations? In this workshop, we will examine remakes and spin-offs of key scenes from Shelley’s novel. Film adaptations include Edison Studios’ 1910 production; director James Whale’s 1931 Hollywood classic; and the beautiful 1973 Spirit of the Beehive, directed by Victor Erice. Using a variety of writing and performance practices, we will consider the cultural impact of Frankenstein and its progeny. Participants are encouraged to bring in their favorite Frankenstein offspring. This workshop is sponsored in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program. 

Texts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 edition, preferably the Norton Critical Edition). Selected scenes from The Spirit of the Beehive will be shown during the workshop (watching the film in advance is optional).

Octavia Butler’s Visionary Future: Readings in Literary Disability Studies

When the MacArthur Foundation awarded Octavia Butler its “genius grant” in 1995, the selection committee wrote: “Her imaginative stories are transcendent fables, which have as much to do with the future as with the present and the past.” This workshop will take participants on a deep dive into one of Butler’s most challenging short stories, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” in which two young adults living with a fictional inherited illness foresee an unclear and often terrifying future. Gradually, they begin to see a more hopeful path forward. We will explore Butler’s visionary future, in which young people of different races and bodyminds work to adapt the world to themselves, to break free from discriminatory social and institutional contexts, and ultimately to “live and do whatever they decide is important to them.” Drawing from readings in literary disability studies, we will consider new tools for opening up textual meaning and model ways to engage students in collaborative research and interdisciplinary interpretation. (Please note that, while appropriate for high school students, Butler’s story is brutal in depicting the illness. The workshop will carefully consider how teachers can work with this text and with content warnings more generally.)

Texts: Octavia Butler, “The Evening and The Morning and the Night”; Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, “On Reading Disability in Literature”; Sami Schalk, “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’”

Immigrant Storytellers and the Challenge of Creating Home: Ibi Zoboi’s American Street and Edwidge Danticat’s “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work”

Ibi Zoboi’s young adult novel focuses on the story of Fabiola, a teenager from Haiti who arrives in Detroit alone, after her mother is detained by immigration officials in New York. Living with cousins, Fabiola must not only work to free her mother but also navigate issues of race, gender identity, poverty, and distrust of the police. She relies on her Haitian identity, especially her Vodou faith, to guide her. This workshop will consider the ways in which Zoboi’s novel, as well as our own writing, can help us understand stories as “our transit point, our shorelines, and our home,” in the words of Edwidge Danticat, who likewise hails from Haiti. Danticat considers aspects of her Haitian past in her essay “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.” She considers how story making helps her “satisfy the desire to interpret and possibly remake . . . her own world.” Participants will write and collaborate to explore how the stories we tell can help create a sense of home, especially for those whose sense of belonging is precarious or divided.

Texts: Ibi Zoboi, American Street; Edwidge Danticat, “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work” 

Cancelled for 2023: When Language Is the Protagonist: Sara Nović’s True Biz and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

Sara Nović’s young adult novel explores how American Sign Language (ASL) instruction shapes the lives of its Deaf and hearing characters at the River Valley School for the Deaf, an Ohio residential school at risk of closure. The novel is a gripping account of the challenges of delayed acquisition of ASL for a teenager and her family, as well as a primer on the history of ASL education and the principles informing the language itself. Cathy Park Hong’s prize-winning essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning considers language at the heart of her endeavor, as an Asian American writer, to both define and defy racialized interpretations of herself and her work. This workshop will explore how participants and their students can find a home for their own translanguaging, even if they primarily use one language. We will experiment with strategies for inviting students to draw on their multiple languages, and we will consider how language can be the centerpiece of compelling stories about community, access, and activism.

ASL interpretation will be available by request; please notify us by Friday, October 13, and submit your request when you register.

Texts: Sara Nović, True Biz; selections from Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (provided)

Emily Dickinson and Harryette Mullen: Reading, Writing, and Expanding the Idea of the Poetic Self

In this workshop we will discuss the notions of legacy and identity that are often at the forefront of our students’ questions about the poems of Emily Dickinson and Harryette Mullen. We will write to read the two poets side by side, probing questions of self and identity, and explore ways that these poets can guide us in our own reading and writing—both in and outside the classroom. We will come to appreciate how both the 19th-century poet and contemporary poet can model condensation, poetic range, and the value of choosing the right word. These two playful poets have a lot to teach us about subverting the obvious and overturning limiting power structures. Utilizing IWT practices, we will explore how these two women expand ideas of self and other, subverting the expected in language and encouraging the analysis of our own personal and imaginative responses to their poems.

Texts: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Reading Edition, ed. R. W. Franklin, or, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson; Harryette Mullen, Recyclopedia

Troubling Innocence, Disquieting Dream: Images of Childhood in James Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me

More than half a century separates James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s letter to his son: two epistolaries about how to grow and thrive as a Black man in America. Of white people, Baldwin writes, “They have destroyed and are destroying thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it . . . But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” Analogously, Coates writes, “The Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.” We will use writing-based practices to explore common threads and divergences in these writers’ thinking, as well as Susan Orlean’s “The American Man at Age 10,” and the photography of Devin Allen. The central question that will guide our work together is: How can IWT practices help our students and us, as teachers, to trouble innocence and disquiet the Dream?

Texts: James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook”; Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me; Susan Orlean, “The American Man at Age 10”; selected photographs by Devin Allen (provided)

The Possibility for Transformation: Leo Tolstoy's “Master and Man” and George Saunders's “Tenth of December”

In an essay on Leo Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” George Saunders writes, “Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.” How might literature awaken us to the possibility of moral transformation? In this workshop, we will use writing-to-read practices to think through Tolstoy’s short story “Master and Man” and Saunders’s short story “Tenth of December,” and consider the capacity for change and moral transformation in fiction and in our own lives. 

Texts: Leo Tolstoy, “Master and Man”; George Saunders, “Tenth of December” (short story) and “And Yet They Drove On” (provided)

Toward an Embodied Understanding of History and Ourselves: Arthur Miller's “The Crucible", W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Coming of John", and Other Stories

Plays and historical fiction allow us to climb inside and inhabit the ideas, emotions and moral reasoning of the past in immediate and vivid ways. Why is this? What is the imagination able to do that facts and reportage cannot, and why does this matter? Using simple performative exercises, participants will explore the physical enactment of text. Speaking language of the past aloud—in dialogue, for example—allows students to viscerally imagine what characters from history experienced. Students spend much of their lives sitting, deeply immersed in virtual worlds. Out of their chairs, looking at each other, performing the emotions, needs, and desires of characters, and physically exploring realities different from their own, students begin to understand the complexities of the past and actively engage in the processes of history. This workshop will observe and examine, through writing and performance, how our understanding subtly changes as we read historical fiction and plays, in comparison to how we read and consider the essay. 

Texts: Arthur Miller, “The Crucible”; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Coming of John" and “Of Mr Booker T. Washington and Others”; James T. Patterson, “The Enemy Within” (short essays provided)

“Clamorous Harbingers”: Macbeth in Harlem and in the World

When a WPA-funded production of “Macbeth” opened in 1936 in Harlem, 10,000 people flooded the streets to watch First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia enter the theater. This “all-Black” production, director Orson Welles said, would be “my great success in my life.” Performed when Welles was just 20 years old, his “Macbeth” moved Inverness Castle from Scotland to a Caribbean island, and his 125-strong cast was drawn from the greats of Black theater and the streets of Harlem. Working collaboratively, we will discuss what boundaries—social, aesthetic, and political—were crossed when Black actors performed Shakespeare on the “legitimate” stage, and how this production brought about the demise of the National Theater Project. We will test Welles’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic against our own readings of the play, and consider it within the lights of other “radical” productions of “Macbeth”—notably, Akira Kurosawa’s, Roman Polanski’s, and various feminist and intersectionalist interpretations. Finally, we will speculate on why “the Scottish play” remains a touchstone for contemporary directors and scholars. This workshop is sponsored in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program. 

Texts: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (any edition); selections from literary criticism and from Clifford Mason, "Macbeth" in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to "Raisin in the Sun" (provided)

Unfortunately, "Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales: Bringing a Lesser-Known Masterpiece to Light" has been cancelled for 2023.