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.
“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
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)
Art & Text Get Cozy
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"
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
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.
Here We Go!
The RISD Writing Center began this academic year with a new brochure. Designed by Max Ackerman (BFA GD ’11), it features on its cover an installation by Jason Huff (MFA DM ’11) that inspired us because it embodies one of our core beliefs—that writing can be a generative force in the making of art and design. (Jason turned his studio into a black box and spent two days and nights in it fasting. On the first day he cleared his thoughts through meditation; on the second day he wrote five hundred descriptions of “every piece I may make someday.” A bell rang approximately every three minutes to keep things on track.)
This brochure, which is full of quotes from RISD students about what writing means to them, text-based student art, and an overview of how writing is practiced at RISD in and out of the curriculum, suggested that the Writing Center just needed a blog. Today, almost a year later, thanks to technical support from Erica Morse (BFA GD ’12 and editor of the amazing All-Nighter), we finally launch that blog.
Stay tuned for posts on all sorts of art + design + writing events, news, workshops, happenings, and more.