Tonight! Jen Bervin's Silk Poems

H101 Formal Analysis: Overview and Q+A
with Jen Liese, Center for Arts & Language
in College Building, 434

Tues 9/26, 4:30-5:30
Wed 9/27, 12-1
(Choose one—no RSVP required.)

Your first H101 paper assignment—the formal analysis—is probably entirely new to you. Your H101 professor will guide you through its conventions, but you may want to learn more. In this workshop, we’ll review the essentials and the finer points of this cornerstone of art history and critical writing and share approaches to seeing, describing, and analyzing works of art and design. Feel free to bring assignment sheets, drafts, and specific questions, or just come and listen in.

H101 Formal Analysis Workshop

H101 Formal Analysis: Overview and Q+A
with Jen Liese, Center for Arts & Language
in College Building, 434

Tues 9/26, 4:30-5:30
Wed 9/27, 12-1
(Choose one—no RSVP required.)

Your first H101 paper assignment—the formal analysis—is probably entirely new to you. Your H101 professor will guide you through its conventions, but you may want to learn more. In this workshop, we’ll review the essentials and the finer points of this cornerstone of art history and critical writing and share approaches to seeing, describing, and analyzing works of art and design. Feel free to bring assignment sheets, drafts, and specific questions, or just come and listen in.

Patti Smith Fans: Why Do You Write?

On September 27, musician, poet, and artist Patti Smith will be reading at the RISD Museum from her book Devotion (Why I Write). Tickets have been sold out for weeks, but hope is not lost!

A&L is hosting a lottery and giving away 75 free tickets and copies of the book (courtesy the RISD Museum). All you have to do is:

Look for the submission boxes at right around campus (in A&L, Carr Haus, the Fleet Library, and at the RISD Museum reception desks). Grab a card and respond to the question "Why do you write?" in words or pictures. Drop the card in the box. (A few more instructions are on the box itself.)

The drawing is this Friday, 9/22. You have four days left. We've gotten lots of (beautiful) entries, but your odds are still amazing. 

PS: This is Patti Smith, people! 

New Name, Same Place, & ...

As of today, September 8, 2017, the RISD Writing Center has a new name: the Center for Arts & Language (A&L). This name reflects our growth in mission and services and our spirit of openness—or perhaps, "&-ness." Today also happens to be National Ampersand Day (thank you, June Shin, for pointing out this amazing fortuity). Let us celebrate the occasions with a favorite quote:

"If the work is a boat, the artist-interlocutor is a sailor ... translating, annotating, mediating, criticizing, interpreting, and extending the contents of the different instances of articulation. ... The artist takes custody of what might have begun within his or her life, consciousness, and body, but the work is already on its way out into the world." —Raqs Media Collective, “How to Be an Artist by Night”

& Come visit. You can find us in the very same place: College Building 240.

& See preceding posts for a selected view into our past.

& Stay tuned for the future.

Serious Summer Fun

Had enough sun, sand, and surf? Love art and language? Whiling away the summer in Rhode Island or Brooklyn? Here are two events you won’t want to miss:

WORD: Text in Contemporary Art
Jamestown Art Center (up through August 13; curator's tour on July 25)

BOMB Small Press Flea
Brooklyn Public Library, Central Branch (July 29, 10am–4pm)

Writes of Passage

Yesterday we stopped by the Fleet Library to witness one of our favorite annual rituals—the submission of graduate students’ written theses to the Library’s permanent collection. The moment felt especially festive as library staff (including Marc Calhoun and Ariel Bordeaux, pictured below) greeted students with chocolate fortune cookies and hearty congratulations.

We can’t wait for this new set of thesis books to reach the shelves—lots of summer reading ahead! In the meantime, one book caught our eye, so recently compiled that the ink hadn’t yet dried …

Fresh off the press!

Open for Dialogue

In the past year or so, and especially since the election, we have noticed more students coming to the Writing Center with texts and speech expressing views about politics, social justice, and identity. Engaging with diverse and deeply held ideas and perspectives is a privilege we take seriously. Our ongoing research and approach to tutoring emphasizes respect for individual voices, experiences, goals, and learning styles. Last weekend we participated in a workshop led by Claudia Ford (Lecturer, HPSS), who helped us understand our role in fostering respectful, open dialogues, even, or especially, when they are difficult.

We’re still honing our skills in this work — in fact, we agreed that this practice requires perpetual reflection — but we want you to know that we’re here for you. We invite you to come in if you would like support in processing and articulating your thoughts or feelings about complex topics, whether that means practicing a speech for a rally, writing a cultural critique for class, or preparing for a Facebook conversation with a friend. All opinions and beliefs are welcome, because we believe that silencing opposing views is unfair and unproductive when we should be discussing them. However, we will stand against bigotry, whether in words or in actions, and put our skills toward building a more inclusive community.

We hope you will consider visiting us as a space for safe and open discussion.

We would also like to share some of the materials and tools we have found most helpful in exploring this topic and preparing for this work:

Suggested Ground Rules for Inclusive Dialogue

Nonviolent Communication Model, The Center for Nonviolent Communication

“Effective Dialogue Skills,” Kathy Obear

“How to DO Empathy,” Alan Seid

“You Talkin’ to Me?” John C. Cavanaugh

“Let’s Not Be Divided,” Trevor Noah

What’s Your Learning Style?

In a recent group meeting, the RISD Writing Center tutors answered the VARK questionnaire. VARK stands for the four different modes of learning: visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic. These styles affect not only how we learn but how we think, make, do, listen, speak, read, and write.

Some of us were surprised by the results—one person discovered that she is primarily kinesthetic, for example, when she thought she was firmly in the read and write camp. These surprises challenged our assumptions about others’ learning styles as well. We used our new awareness to think about tutoring methods that might best serve various learning styles, and about how these preferences come into play in the studio.

Here’s the questionnaire if you’re interested in taking it yourself. And next time you come to the Writing Center, feel free to share your style!

The Best Half-Day Ever

On October 16, 2015, from 1-5, the RISD Writing Center’s dream symposium will be happening right here at RISD. If you’re interested in writing as an artist or designer or writing by artists and designers, you won’t want to miss it. Click on the poster below for all the details.

Bravo!

Pomp and circumstance with hi-jinx, hilarity, and a touch of anarchy — RISD Commencement is always a headline-worthy affair. But this year was extra exciting for us, because Malcolm Rio, Graduate Student Speaker, and Rachel Ossip, Senior Class Speaker, both happen to be RISD Writing Center tutors.

Malcolm stood tall in his studded heels, checked his snapchat, and argued for the value of learning to “fail well” in a world of contingent crises. Rachel compared the RISD we know today to the drinking fountain we could have been in a poetic meditation on origins, water, and what stays with us. Of course John Waters was insanely amazing, but these guys were just as brilliant, just out of the gates of RISD.

Check out their speeches at right, and visit the RISD Commencement 2015 website for more.

http://commencement.risd.edu/speakers

http://commencement.risd.edu/speakers

“You are a Ffabschrifter”

Students of Lucinda Hitchcock and Rachel Ossip’s Shaping Language course spent the semester “ffabschrifting” — treating writing as making and making as writing and simultaneously creating content and form, each with the other in mind. The class hosted a final event/party downtown in the Design Office last night.

Each student read their own poem/story/definition of “ffabschrifting,” and Hitchcock and Ossip read a transcript — no, a ffabschrift — of their own previous conversation about the course’s development and all the brilliant, unexpected ways students took on the role of ffabschrifter. This variety sparked some engaging debate: on the one hand, it seems like we are all ffabschrifters, whether we know it or acknowledge it or embrace it or not; at the same time, purposeful and conscious attention made all the difference to everyone’s process and resulting work.

The group then invited visitors into the discussion with some questions: Does ffabschrifting have to involve text? Is it limited to just writing and making? Is “ffabschrifting” the right word for what’s happening here? Amid all these loose ends, one thing was certain: ffabschrifting is more than a practice — it’s a movement. We love these ideas and these questions, and can’t wait to see how the movement advances.

Check out some of the class’s work on their website: http://shapinglanguage.tumblr.com/

The Shaping Language course will be offered to GD seniors and grad students again next year (and non-majors with permission from the instructor).

Triple Canopy’s Publication Intensive

Interested in publication as an art form, an evolving medium, and a site for experimentation? This summer program is a great opportunity to learn about the history of publication and actively engage in the contemporary practice. According to their announcement, participants will “research, analyze, and enact an approach to publication that hinges on today’s networked forms of production and circulation but also mines the history of print culture and artistic practice.”

Check out the details and apply by Monday, April 6.

“It, Me, You, Us” Lecture Series

The Writing Center is very proud to be co-hosting “It, Me, You, Us: Close Encounters with Interpretation,” a series of lectures exploring varied ways of writing about and engaging with art, with an emphasis on the sensory, the subjective, and the shared. Why? Because experiencing art, thinking about art, and talking about art are all essential aspects of writing about art.

Don’t miss Mira Schor, one of our very favorite artist-writers, on October 16. And in the meantime, visit her blog, A Year of Positive Thinking.

Mira Schor, Portrait of My Brain, 2007. Oil on linen, 16 x 12 in.

A Look Back, A Leap Forward

What a wonderful year it has been for the RISD Writing Center. We’ve taken on new ventures and participated in engaging events, from public speaking workshops and Grad Thesis Writing Retreats to a full day of exploring ekphrasis and our series of Readings in the Writing Center. It’s been a pleasure to collaborate with faculty, staff, students, and guests, and we want to thank everyone who could be part of it.

Now that it’s summer, we’re looking ahead to 2014-15, and we’ve got plenty in store: we’ll be continuing our support for the RISD writing community and continuing to build on some of this year’s new endeavors, but we’re also expanding in exciting new ways. Here’s a sneak peek at what we’re planning and what we’re reading.

This summer, we’ll be considering new perspectives for tutors, especially in terms of collaborative learning and social justice. These readings will help us train tutors as leaders and as allies, both in the work they already do and in new approaches:

— Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors
— bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress
— Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
— Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change

This coming year, the RISD Writing Center will expand its tutoring to include writing, public speaking, and visual rhetoric for all RISD composers. In preparation for this big step toward multimodal composition, we’re looking at the following books:

— Sohui Lee and Russell Carpenter’s Routledge Reader on Writing Centers & New Media
— N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis
— David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel’s The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric
— Le Odell and Susan M. Katz’s Writing in a Visual Age
— Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground
— Mathieu Borysevicz’s The Book About Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground

As always, we’re keeping in touch with critical conversations around writing, art, and design. These texts are our latest finds on the topic:

— Noel Carroll’s On Criticism
— Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum’s On Not Knowing: How Artists Think
— Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing

We wish you good summer reading, too, and look forward to seeing you all in the Fall.

Spring Break Grad Thesis Writing Retreat

This Spring Break, you don’t have time to lounge on a beach in Mexico or binge-watch House of Cards. This year, you’re working on your graduate written thesis. But you do deserve a break — an opportunity to put away distractions and focus on writing. You deserve a day or two at the Spring Break Grad Thesis Writing Retreat.

Check out the poster for details and RSVP before it fills up.

The Event of (Y)Our Dreams

One whole afternoon. Three events. Writing inspired by art. Art inspired by writing.

It's SHOW TELL/TELL SHOW: A Half-day of Events on the Subject of Ekphrasis. And it all takes place Thursday, February 6, 2014. Check out the poster below for details, and get ready to dive into what we’re all about.

Two Sweet Events — Join Us!

Come write fortunes for your fellow students. Will they ace a big test? Will they get that Wintersession internship? Will love find them in studio? You decide! Plus, we’ll have a variety of cookies for you to snack on while you write.

If you find your inspiration later, you can come in to contribute fortunes all month long. In December, we’ll put your messages into fortune cookies and hand them out during finals.

Thanks to the Center for Student Involvement’s RISD 360° program for teaming up on this fun event.

Friday, November 8th, 6:30-8:00 PM

Start off your weekend with the second Readings in the Writing Center event this year. Join us to hear the works and works-in-progress of RISD faculty members Rick Benjamin and Gareth Jones. Click on the poster above for more information.

We look forward to seeing you there!

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!

*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

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

Fact and fiction with TripleCandie