Mark Booth

This writing workshop's point of departure is a creative response to Charles and Ray Eames' influential film Powers of Ten and George Perec's essay Species of Spaces. In Powers of Ten, the Eames' explore humankind's scale in a progression of images in powers of ten as seen from an individual cell to Earth's position in the galaxy. In a similar fashion, Perec examines increasingly greater scales of experience¿¿from a blank piece of paper to the world and outer space. Using these concepts of scales of magnification, we write fiction and poetry about an imaginary universe of our own devising¿¿from the outer limits of space to life on a microscopic scale. We examine contemporary micro-nations, science fiction, the natural world, and other sources as exemplar and inspiration.

A diagram might be more useful than a paragraph in describing this course. Or possibly a song. I¿ll make do with shoe-horning my thoughts into this short description format for the moment. We¿ll speak about this more later so no worries. Writing can be contained in the context of a page but it can also flower additionally elsewhere. This course explores how your writing might function outside the flatness of page space and out into the world. Asking, how might your ideas be further invigorated, developed and tested off ¿page space¿ and into additional physical contexts through the deployment of your ideas via transposition and translation. We will repeatedly ask: How do your thoughts become tangible? How do you articulate your ideas? How do you translate your thoughts from inchoate chemical and electrical impulses into something that you can say or tell someone else? In this course, we explore the transmission of your ideas beyond the written exclusively, through and into diverse possibilities of media and process. Here, you will honor your creative process, and creative discipline while considering, devising, and implementing transpositions of writing, beyond the page (brain space, page space, paragraph space, book space). You will explore how translating your words into other contexts such as physical space, time, walls, floors, ceiling, and messages (secret, private, public), might further reveal new understanding about your work. The course will approach communication through two pathways - generative prompts, and the shaping of your own independent work from 'words' to 'words+something else'. For inspiration, we will use in class prompts, homework invitations, and carefully selected readings. Students will be asked to challenge and develop their own independent work through creative experiment and research.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.