Got Glosophobia?*

And that’s just lesson one in our Fall workshop series Got Glossophobia? Public Speaking Workshops for Artists and Designers. Led by the fabulous artist, actor, activist, and RISD alum Ruthie Scarpino (pictured above), these workshops are rooted in both performance and improv theory and practice and artists and designers’ methods, content, and contexts. We just got a preview of Ruthie’s plans, and while we don’t want to give too much away, we can tell you that these workshops will be brilliantly conceived, deeply useful, and insanely fun.

E-mail mbarrett01@risd.edu to learn more or sign up.

Speak up, make eye contact, and take up space!

Speak up, make eye contact, and take up space!

*Glossophobia, from the Greek glōssa, meaning tongue, and phobos, meaning fear or dread.

A Semester in Events

This Spring, the Writing Center co-sponsored several amazing and inspiring visitors who helped us think about both writing in new ways and new ways of writing.Creative writers from all departments gathered to learn and share with comics artist and writing guru Lynda Barry. With Barry’s guidance, we shook off the self-editing shackles and focused – mind and body – on the task of recalling and recreating memories.

Film poster for Tom Sutton's Pavilion

Film poster for Tom Sutton's Pavilion

Tim Sutton showed his film Pavilion and discussed his process, revealing how writing and making are sometimes the same cyclical process: full of inspiration, temporary hurdles, and plenty of revision.

Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett of TripleCandie plunged us into their explorations of exhibition, creativity, and authorship through a performance-talk about the artist Siren Bliss. Hearing their stories had us asking: How does putting something in print help make it real? How does stating fiction as fact call other facts into question? For us, the line between truth and fiction remains happily fuzzy.

These events contributed to the ever-multiplying connections between writing and making and illuminated the impact of our processes. Stay tuned for more exciting events come Fall.

Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry

Fact and fiction with TripleCandie

Fact and fiction with TripleCandie

Art & Text Get Cozy

A view of the RISD Graphic Design Triennial 2010–2012

A view of the RISD Graphic Design Triennial 2010–2012

Is it just us, or are art and text getting notably cozy in the chilly fall air? For your consideration:

The Graphic Design Triennial, up this week at Woods-Gerry, is a feast of form and language. The curators (including Writing Center tutor Anther Kiley) boldly organized their selection not by media but by thematic tags, including “writing,” “narrative,” and “authorship” alongside “tools,” “systems,” and “pedagogy.”

Tutor Malcolm Rio presenting on the "rhetoric of design"

Tutor Malcolm Rio presenting on the "rhetoric of design"

As of this fall, the Writing Center’s Sunday night tutor meetings feature a Tutors’ Salon, at which we each present on a subject of interest, then talk about it together. Subjects so far have included: the “rhetoric of design”; composing comics; and the essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” in which the writer Gloria Anzaldúa argues that controlling accents controls culture itself.Tomorrow (3:30, Metcalf Auditorium) new media artist Ben Rubin visits RISD to talk about his Shakespeare Machine. A “linguistic supercollider sculpture (that’s also a chandelier)” (per ArtNews) installed at New York’s Public Theater, the Shakespeare Machine algorithmically combines phrases from thirty-seven of the bard’s plays.

Last week’s National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists, held at SVA in New York, took as its theme “WORDIMAGE/IMAGEWORD,” and RISD showed up in force. Professor Mike Fink presented “A Shared Legacy: To Read Pictures and to See Sentences”; ID grad alum Kyung Hoon Hyun presented “Design Democracy”; and Writing Center Director Jennifer Liese presented “Toward a History (and Future) of the Artist Statement.” Keynote speaker Bill Beckley’s talk, “Image Boink Text: The Erotic Relationship of Language and Art,” was a tour-de-force of speculative notes on the many ways in which image and text commingle, from the literal (e.g., the captioned documentary images of the Earthworks artists) to the invisible (e.g., the historical narrative embedded in The Raft of the Medusa).

And finally …

Photographer Sally Mann visited RISD a couple of weeks back and in a sold-out lecture shifted the audience’s gaze from her images to her text, reading from her forthcoming memoir, If Memory Serves.

No, it’s definitely not just us.

The Mike Fink Aerie

Today we attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Mike Fink Aerie, a reading alcove in CB 521 (aka, the Old RISD Library, the hallowed shelves of which have been all but bare since the Fleet Library’s opening in 2006). Poet and English professor Mairéad Byrne introduced the space and the guest of honor, noting that she hoped this reclaimed nook would be the first of many here that would “redefine the library by going back to its original roots.” 

The Mike Fink Aerie ribbon-cutting ceremony, in the Old Library

The Mike Fink Aerie ribbon-cutting ceremony, in the Old Library

Mike Fink, RISD English professor for some 50 years, storyteller extraordinaire, and keeper of collective memory, reminded us of the Old Library’s long history as a place for contemplation and, in wartime, respite from a troubled world. He described the provenance of the wicker chairs in the aerie (they once belonged to RISD professor George Sullivan, for whom the Library was the heart of the campus), as well as the inspiration behind his selection of books on birds, recalling his recent course on the topic and likening himself to the hummingbird, which “flies backward like my mind. I like to go back and tap the past.”

With that, a group of well-wishers applauded professors Byrne and Fink, who invite the whole RISD community to visit. Enter the Old Library and look up: like the real thing—a bird’s nest perched on a cliff—this aerie is nestled up high, on the balcony.