In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates chooses to address his son, finding language to describe the world he must prepare for; In the autobiographical novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong’s protagonist writes to a mother who cannot read, sharing the way memories of war, growing up as an immigrant, and being queer live in him; In her work, Eula Biss speaks directly to those who share her embodied reality of whiteness. If you could choose whom you would address—who you are in conversation with—what more would you have to say? How might this differently permission both the voice and content of your writing?
In her speech “A Humanist View” (1975), Toni Morrison laments what remains unsaid and undescribed when the locus of address is understood to exist outside your own experience—occupying you then in the work of explaining and explaining yourself. She issued a striking challenge and permission, “…you don’t have to do it anymore. You can go ahead and talk straight to me.”
This class takes on that challenge.
Who will you speak to? What will you discover you have to say? What voice will you encounter as suddenly there, and suddenly possible?
In this writing workshop, students will be invited to write literary nonfiction essays that address their chosen imagined audience. We will engage writing and invited guest authors/speakers who have done the same in their work. From the fields of Oral History and Memory Studies, we will borrow ideas of listening as a dialogic and intersubjective encounter and the embodied self. We will reframe conversations about voicelessness + facelessness, and instead, consider concepts of un-hearing + unseeing— inviting new agencies and accountabilities into our creative practice.
This workshop will be a generative space; a space for experiments in ethical listening to the self and to others; a space to invest in your particular; a space to describe questions with your lived experience, and a place of permission to ask them.
