DATE & TIME
Saturday, April 13

10:00 AM - 4:00 PM (with 60 min. lunch break)

COST
$175 ($140 for Paragraph Members)

LOCATION
Paragraph Union Square

INSTRUCTOR
Diana Goetsch

Free Writing Intensive (Part 2: Extraordinary Seeing)

Sometimes the effort to be profound or original gets us stuck. We forget that insight is not what goes into a piece of writing, but rather what comesout of it. What goes in is work. Just as, if you were to climb a mountain, you’d first need to do some work (climbing) before it is possible to stop and take in the view (insight), writing needs to be worked before it can yield insight. That insight—the trustworthy view we end up with, which is nothing we could have begun with—can be called extraordinary seeing.

This workshop, a day-long session opening the vault to the theory and practice of free-writing, offers practices designed to liberate us from habitual patterns, and alter the “DNA” of how we write. Participants in the Free-Writing Intensive (which was first introduced ten years ago at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival) are often startled by what comes out of their pens. “I was quite taken, moved, and frequently overwhelmed by the experience,” said one writer. “It’s the truest writing I’ve ever done,” said another.

The Free-Writing Intensive is perfect for all genres, and an antidote to “writer’s block,” as we generate a volume of new material over the course of the day. (You need not have participated in “Part 1” to register for this session.)

Diana Goetsch (www.dianagoetsch.com) has published eight collections of poems and dozens of nonfiction articles. Her work has appeared in leading magazines, newspapers and anthologies including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The American Scholar, theChicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a renowned teacher of writing, having taught at numerous universities, MFA programs, and conferences. Most recently, she was the Grace Paley Teaching Fellow at The New School.