Write Wild: A Generative Retreat
TAKE A WHOLE DAY OFF TO EXPLORE, EXPERIMENT, AND (RE)GENERATE
WRITE WILD is a day-long creative writing retreat in Houston, TX, focused on generating new ideas and work. In four 90-minute sessions, each led by a different facilitator, you'll experiment outside your usual form, genre, and style, allowing you to peek around the corner of your usual creative process to discover what lies beyond.
Write Wild is back with four brand new sessions that facilitate experimentation, collaboration, and working across the genres and forms you are used to. All writers are welcome, as well as visual artists and other creative spirits who want to explore their creativity more through the written word (and feel free to bring a sketchbook or camera, too). Let go of self-censorship, be inspired by creative forces outside yourself, and see how your work changes when you look at it from other angles. This time, the FuenteCo Write Wild team is joined by guest facilitator Chelsey Clammer, award-winning author, editor, and writing instructor.
Sharing your work is always optional. Facilitation will be in English, but you should feel free to write in any language.
Guest Facilitator: Chelsey Clammer
Chelsey Clammer is the author of BodyHome and Circadian, which was the winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, Hobart, Essay Daily, and The Water~Stone Review, among more than one hundred other publications. She is the Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown, a reader for Creative Nonfiction magazine, and an online creative writing instructor and columnist for WOW! Women On Writing. Chelsey received her MFA in Creative Writing from Rainier Writing Workshop. She is currently working on a collection of essays, Human Heartbeat Detected, that looks at the ways in which we are "human" to one another. Clammer is also currently writing a craft book about lyric essays, Sound It Out. She lives in Waco, TX.
Sessions
Unfiltered, Unaltered: Radical Experiments in Letting Go of Perfectionism
Patricia Coral
Who do you write for? Who are the invisible eyes constantly looking over your shoulder? And if you ignored your imaginary readers, how would your writing change—in content, tone, and level of honesty? Together, we'll consider our writing both on the page and out in the world. We'll experiment with ideas of permanence and ephemerality, and with how to stop letting a sense of perfectionism rule our work. We'll think about who and what influences the choices we make in our writing, about what function the idea of audience serves in our process (and whether we even need an audience), and about the radical notion that our very firsts drafts—no matter how raw and unfiltered—might have real value.
Form First: Discovering Stories through Unexpected Structures
Chelsey Clammer
Do you ever start writing about a supermarket visit and discover halfway through that your piece might as well be a personal essay about your relationship with your parents? Do you ever find yourself wondering how lyrical you can get in a piece of prose, or whether your poetry is too narrative? Do you think you'd have fun trying out more experimental narrative structures but don't quite know where to start? In this session, we'll practice the intentional use of unusual, surprising forms—employment applications, report cards, weather reports—in order to discover new meaning and depth in our work, whether true or fictional! We'll introduce you to different storytelling structures and ways to generate ideas through form, so that you'll leave the session with inventive new drafts, as well as new approaches in your creative toolbox.
Steal the Scene: Storytelling Inspiration from Cinematography
Tayyba Maya Kanwal
Can words on the page weave the kind of vivid visual magic in our mind's eye that film can on the screen? Great film scenes rely on more than story: they use creative opportunities offered by the visual medium to make plot moves, reveal character, manage pacing, and, most importantly, elicit specific feelings in the viewer. We'll use examples from film to play with writing scenes that use visual and spatial tricks. We will guide the reader’s inner eye where we most want, or cast a mood, or maybe even delve into the surreal. Finally, we'll talk about the experience of using these approaches to make cinematic magic happen on our own pages.
Play It by Ear: Sound as a Creative Tool for Voice-Finding and Introspection
Layla Al-Bedawi
Do you write best in the ambient noise of a coffee shop, or does your writer brain prefer silence? Do you have a favorite writing playlist? In this session, we invite you to lean in and examine the role of sound in your creative process more closely, to take the concept of being inspired by music several steps further: we'll experiment with deliberate changes to our aural environment and explore how different soundscapes can influence what and how we write. We'll use sound—both recorded and found in the world around us—as an experimental guide in our writing process and a way to access stories from different angles and "moods", and even play with the use of music as a creative re-drafting strategy.
Cost: $95
Participants: 12
Facilitators
