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

Write Your Way through Wintersession

This Wintersession the Writing Center is hosting five different workshops designed for all RISD writing—from function to fiction, research to rhetoric, professional to personal.

See below for details (click to enlarge), get inspired, and reserve your spot today! (RSVP to mbarrett01@risd.edu)