Mark Booth

The inspiration for the course is the Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Wonder), or cabinet of curiosities, prevalent in 16th and 17th Century Europe. These `cabinets¿ were encyclopedic collections of objects kept by rulers, aristocrats, and early practitioners of science. In this prompt-driven workshop we will create our own cabinet of wonders, not a collection of physical objects but a collection of writing, arising from images, ideas, writing prompts, constraints, noises, observations, and other stimuli. The class meetings will be our `studio¿ and the bulk of the writing for the course will be completed during class sessions. We will approach writing as a collective exercise, taking the position that writing together, during a specific period of time (the class session) is a powerful and transformative act. The instructor and the students will provide the `curiosities,¿ and weekly homework will involve the creation of time-based prompts and constraints to be used in the classroom. In class writing exercises will be read aloud in their virgin state and edited pieces may be workshopped at the discretion of the student. This course is open to writers of all disciplines as well as studio artists interested in writing as a spontaneous practice.

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.