Hello Friends!
I hope you’re keeping cool on these long, hot summer days–and reading and writing! Or maybe resting? I personally took a break from my creative activities for a couple of months, for some much needed rest and refocusing after a very productive year for me, writing-wise. I normally draft about a page a month that makes it through revision, and this past year, I drafted triple that amount! I am pretty excited about it. I am also excited about getting back to the blank page next weekend.
If you have not yet signed up for my Summer Pop-Up Workshops, now’s your last chance to grab a spot (just a couple left!) for next Saturday, July 21, in my generative workshop called “Writing’s Country: Place and Our Writing Practice.” Email me today at kate (at) kateasche (dot) com to request the registration form! Full details, including the book to buy (right now!) over on my workshops page.
I’m also still taking sign ups for the August 5 workshop, “The Tin House Writer’s Notebook II: A Writing and Revising Workshop for All Genres.”
I also want to give you a sneak-peek at two innovative one-day workshops I’ll be offering this fall. Registration isn’t open just yet (look for my announcement in the next couple of weeks), but do please email me (kate (at) kateasche (dot) com) if you want me to add you to the short list for when I’m ready to enroll. Drumroll, please…
Mark your calendar now for two brand new, one-day, generative writing workshops that will take you on an interdisciplinary adventure and inspire you–through reading literature, listening to music, and experiencing specially curated docent tours at the Crocker Art Museum–to make new connections and leaps in your work as you write new drafts and share them for supportive feedback in the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) method. Workshop dates are September 9 and October 27, 2018. Enroll in one, the other, or both! They will run in sequence and make a fantastic pair.
Why this new workshop approach? As some folks in our writing community know, in addition to my undergrad and graduate work in poetry, I also have a minor in classical music performance (clarinet)–a big minor (I almost double-majored!)–that included musicology and music history courses, which I loved. In addition, in preparation for my study abroad semester in (way back in fall 2002), I took a series of courses in art and architectural history and design. All of this fine arts coursework dovetailed perfectly with my core (a.k.a. canonical) literature courses which, at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, are always taught in chronological sequence (we can thank the engineering-oriented administrative approach for that one!).
What this means is that, by the time I got on the plane to spend half a year studying in London and traveling Europe, I had a clear structure in my head of the basic arcs of western literature, arts, architecture and music from the ancient Greeks to the present. This period-based interdisciplinary cultural understanding was a tremendous asset as I explored London and environs, Venice and Florence and Rome, Budapest, Frankfurt and central Germany, Prague, Vienna and Paris–and on later trips to Brandenburg and Berlin, Stockholm, Krakow, southern France, Barcelona and Madrid, and Athens, Crete and the Cyclades. That mental architecture increased my understanding and, more importantly, my pleasure in the art and architecture I saw, the concerts I attended and the literature I bought in translation everywhere I went.
I want to share with our community opportunities for one-day immersion in this rich, period-based approach to experiencing the arts–thus, these workshops. The September workshop will focus on my version of the “Interwar Period,” which I am calling 1918 (end of World War I) to 1941 (the year the U.S. entered World War II). The October workshop will encompass the era of U.S. involvement in World War II through the Postwar era and roughly the first half of the Cold War period.
My hope is to continue our march through time in the winter and spring, so stay tuned for all of it!
I look forward to writing (and reading and looking and listening) with you,
Kate
