Workshop Leader: Emily Wortman-Wunder, melospiza@usa.net
Enrollment Limit: 20
When we write, one of the hardest things to do is break out of the comfortable, narrative voice in our head that often seems to want to reduce every sentence, every thought, to a replica of the one that came before it. In many circumstances this voice is perfectly adequate; sometimes, though, we want to break its ability to constrain what we’re trying to say. One way that writers have broken out of a constrictive narrative style is to adopt a governing structure outside of the discipline of language, and to write according to the rules of a certain musical form instead. James Joyce did this, most famously in his fugue chapter from Ulysses. Toni Morrison based her novel Jazz on the style and rhythms of this rich musical form.
In this workshop, we will experiment with writing prose (although your prose may begin to sound like poetry) influenced by the musical genre of your choice. We will begin by reading brief passages from some musically-inspired works, and discussing what aspects of a particular musical form were appropriated. Then we’ll discuss some other potentially useful musical styles and discuss how imagery, sentence structure, and sentence rhythm can be reconfigured—reinvented, really—through the discipline of music. At each stage of our discussion we’ll freewrite, trying to put our discoveries into action.