Readings, Class Visits, & Workshops

Rusty also is available to give readings, class visits, and workshops. Feel free to contact her about this using the email form to the left.

Here is an example of a previous workshop given at University Press Books in Berkeley, CA in a past year.

Five Mondays 7-9:30pm

Rusty Morrison’s UPB Workshop Description:

Inspirited Revision

Typically, revision means using the expertise about craft that we’ve acquired in our past study of the discipline of writing The best practice of such revision calls forth intuitively all the relevant skills of discernment that we’ve acquired in order to refine our new work, as it exists on the page.

In this workshop, we will attend to what is most intuitive in this process, and we will attempt more radical, more playful, more serendipitous forms of revision, so as to inspire or inspirit one’s vision in, and of, a work.

These strategies for ‘inspiriting’ a piece of writing can include:

• incorporating new content or new formal methods or new syntactical structuring or oppositional shifts of perspective so as to surprise ourselves into seeing more broadly the terrains that our poems inhabit, as well as what alternatives are nascent in the work;
• or leaving the piece alone, while still discovering many provocative aspects in that work with which to begin new work born of prescience about the current work’s trajectories.

These forms of ‘revision’ have a dual purpose: to achieve as much as possible with the particular poem at hand, and to use these practices to mid-wife new directions for future work. In both cases, our goal is to attend to, and to strengthen the intuition that opens us to unforeseen potential in our choices for this work and for future work.