Patchwork 3.3 recap
Good morfternevening*, Patchworkers!
Sometimes the act of workshop facilitation is an exercise in humility for me, and I am grateful for the compassion and patience of my workshop participants. This is especially true when I am experiencing greater-than-usual anxiety or pain, or less-than-usual sleep, or, like yesterday, all three. So, thank you. Thank you for your patience and your faith and your willingness to come into community space with me and trust me with your words and your creative process even when I’m tripping over words and stumbling through plans.
Sunday was one of those tripping/stumbling/fumbling days, but it was also a great workshop!
We started with a reading of Maureen Birnbaum Goes Shopynge, found in the Maureen Birnbaum: Barbarian Swordsperson anthology (read all about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maureen_Birnbaum,_Barbarian_Swordsperson). We paused along the way to discuss stylistic tics that may date our writing (Muffy is very 80s/early 90s, especially the clothing styles!), or make our writing harder to access (Effinger uses “go/goes” rather than “say/says” and it’s atypical enough and frequent enough to become distracting). We also talked about the difficulty of interpreting whether the presence of a problematic element (in this story, American economic imperialism) is an intentional critique or an unintentional perpetuation.
As writers, especially writers who may have political goals for our writing, it is important to be both aware of the way we might perpetuate systems of oppression within our own writing and also be gentle and compassionate with ourselves, recognizing that no matter how intentionally we write, no matter how consciously anti-oppressive our story worlds are, or how diligently we work to call attention to problematic elements in our stories (since not all stories can be or should be utopian!), there will be readers who see within our work the perpetuation rather than the subversion of oppressive systems. This does not make our work less valuable or less political – it is just the way it is.
And on that note, one of the services that Writing in the Margins offers is editing and critique. The just-written work shared in the workshops is never critiqued or questioned, but once you’ve had a chance to work with a piece you may want an informed and professional feminist eye on your work. I can help with that!
After we read about Muffy’s adventures in Sherwood Forest Mall, we decided not to stick with the original plan of writing our characters into someone else’s universe (which is what Effinger did with Muffy). It turned out to be just a bit too challenging, and none of us were sure how to approach the topic. This is something we might come back to later in this round of Patchwork, but we’ll give it some further thought and contemplation first! Instead, we wrote on three prompts.
1 – Food. (From The Daily Writer.)
This is a two-part prompt. In the workshop we wrote about the significance of food for ourselves or our character. As a take-home prompt, do some research about the food that is relevant to your story. What symbolism is built into the eating rituals or routines of your world? What foods comfort your character? What foods are traditional, and what foods are abhorrent to your character or to their culture? The prompt that we took this from suggested doing research into the foods of other cultures, and we talked about the potential for appropriation here. If you’d like some reading on food appropriation, let me know and I can send you some articles!
2 – “Seven days ago, I ________. Now nobody will speak to me.” (From The Pocket Muse)
3 – “Something big is brewing behind your back.” (From The Pocket Muse)
We decided not to write on this one, because we were all feeling a bit down, and wanted something that was more uplifting. And so…
3a – “The world is full of winners and losers. Most of us identify with the losers. Write about being a winner.” (From The Pocket Muse)
Now, make yourself some tea or take a deep breath. Stretch, turn on some music, read a book or spend a few minutes outside. You are doing great! We are almost halfway through Patchwork, and you have already generated fantastic work. High five!!!
We will not be meeting for Patchwork next Sunday, but since I booked my flights on the wrong day, I will actually be in town. Given this, there may be a Smutty Story Circle next week, so maybe I’ll see some of you then!
– Tiffany
* “Morfternevening” is the technical term for that stretch of hours on a Monday when all the things you thought you’d accomplish in the morning somehow end up looking like they might happen in the afternoon and then actually happening in the evening, but admitting that would be admitting defeat in the face of the Mondayness of it all. And that shall not stand! So this is not an evening missive, friends. NO. No. It is a morfternevening missive, exactly as I had intended for it to be. *cough* *whistling* *scuffing feet*
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