Form As Listening: On the Spiritual & Ecological in the Sentence & Story

Thursday November 21st, 2024 11:30AM—2PM Pacific over Zoom
(A recording will be made available to all registrants for a limited period afterwards.)

“Form is about listening.” 

– Teresa Carmody

“The ear is the first organ to develop in the fetus and the last one to stop functioning during the process of death. This prominence at the beginning and end of our life cycle indicates that the ear may hold valuable keys to the mysteries of life…

While our eyes help light our path through this world, we also know that we came from darkness and will return to darkness…

Where we cannot see, sound can guide us.”

– Russill Paul, The Yoga of Sound

"The only way to know the world or think about the world is to think with it, is to participate with/in it, is to intervene, and make marks upon it - even as those marks are made on our own bodies in the same moment. The idea that there is a place to occupy, a privileged site upon which to perch ourselves and with unbothered feathers look out on the world, a place outside the world that is pure and uncluttered (or perhaps deep within ourselves in its promising interiority) from which we can view everything… a view from nowhere and everywhere at once… is the epistemic affordance of geophysical and colonial stability. To know is to navigate speciated territories of corporeal exchanges. To know is to come unhinged, to be bruised, to be beaten, to be broken. To know is to be filleted and de-fleshed. It is to have stretch marks penned on the body, the fonts of an encounter, echoes of an obstruction. One does not think without becoming something else."

– Bayo Akomolafe

“I think particularly of the English sentence, which forces one to begin with a subject, a kind of encapsulated self or other that speaks, sees, knows, or, in the case of objects, a subjectivity that presumes grasp-ability.”

– Renee Gladman

“How could we be one, or two, or three? We are more gerund than cold, hard noun. More animacy than strictly animal. We ensoul the world and are ensouled in return. Our myths about individuation and linearity no longer hold all the trouble. And all the love. We need to stop sticking out our two hands like it proves everything comes in oppositional dualisms. How many hands does the tree have? The peony? The pileated woodpecker? How many hands is the mycelium using to crochet intimacy from plant to tree to plant through the soil?”

– Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand

What is the language with which you move through the world, through which you think, experience, and “are”? Where does that language come from and what does it say about who you are, how you have come to be, how you continue to become, your environment, your privileges, your contextual entanglement with the world around you? When you look closely at just one sentence you have written, how does the sentence enact the performance of your existence and relationship to the world? What method of reading does your writing invite?

Both the sentence and the structure of the story represent and enact particular ways of seeing the world, being in the world, relating to the world. Seemingly simple sentences can enact particular value systems and ideologies: privileging the individual or the subject; an emphasis on action and doing, rather than existing; the emphasis on things or nouns and on static boundaries of beingness; the belief in cause and effect or causality in general; the buying into linear (and capitalist notions of) time; the glorification of triumph or the hero’s journey; the assumption that conflict is the main mechanism for story or happening; the erasure of alternate ways of inter-being…

We often glean meaning from the overall structure of a story, the narrative shape revealing something about subjects like reality, transformation, life and death. And before the story, there is the sentence, which can reveal an entire worldview through the shape it assumes, through the relationships it maps, which ideological systems it upholds, what power structures it validates simply through its grammar.

This is an invitation to listen to form, to ourselves, to the stories that are already here inside and around us. We will delve into spiritual being, ecological storytelling, and grammatical sense-making via craft discussions, guided meditation, intuition/shamanic practices, generative writing prompts, and inquiry/investigation of our own writing.

Bring: A single sentence from your own writing.

Suggested Reading: “On the Limits and Possibilities of the Sentence” by Janice Lee (Catapult)

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Pricing:

The following payment model is inspired by and borrowed from the payment model of Bayo Akomolafe’s class, We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks.

This workshop offers a sliding scale based on your relative financial standing. In an effort to reflect disparity in economic condition and access to wealth, the following payment system is designed for those with more wealth to help cover the costs of those with less access to wealth and resources. We trust your discernment of your current financial situation and how you fit into the global economic context.

As you decide what amount to pay, please consider your present-day financial situation governed by income, but also the following factors: historical discrimination faced by your peoples; your financial wealth (retirement/savings/investments); your access to income and financial wealth, both current and anticipated (how easily could you earn more income compared to other people in your community, country, and the world; are you expecting an inheritance); people counting on your financial livelihood including dependents and community members; the socio-economic conditions of your locale (relative to other places in your country and in the world); your relationship to food & resource scarcity.

$250 Partner

$175 Supporter (Note: This amount reflects the “real” value of this course.)

$100 Companion

$50 Friend

Scholarships are also still available for anyone needing further financial assistance. Please email Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com for more info, or if you are feeling challenged in any way by the financial requirements of participation.

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JANICE LEE (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 8 books of fiction, creative nonfiction, & poetry, most recently, Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023). An essay (co-authored with Jared Woodland) is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films. She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Her next book seeks to explore ties between the Korean cultural concept of han, narratives of inherited trauma in the West, the Korean folk traditions and shamanic practices of her ancestors (especially rituals around death), the history and creation of Korean script (Hangul), and revisions of the Korean myth of Princess Bari. Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and facilitates guided meditations bringing together elements from several different lineages as a mesa-carrying practitioner of the Q’ero tradition of medicine work and as a practitioner of Engaged Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh). She also incorporates elements of ancestor work, Korean shamanic ritual (Muism), traditional Korean folk practices, plant medicine & flower essence work, card readings & divination, and interspecies communication. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. She can be found online at http://janicel.com and Instagram: @diddioz.