Spirit Level
w/ Stan Dragland & Beth Follett
Santiago, CHILE
February 1 to 15, 2009
“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."
AUDRE LORDE

‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘
Just as for the poet writing verse, so it is for the prose writer: success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search for the mot juste, for the sentence in which every word is inalterable, the most effective marriage of sounds and concepts. I am convinced that writing prose should not be any different form writing poetry. In both cases it is a question of looking for the unique expression, one that is concise, concentrated and memorable.
ITALO CALVINO
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `

“Wilderness. So overwritten it should probably be granted a reprieve from definition, maybe even a lengthy sabbatical from speech. Nevertheless, let me write down that something speaks inside us, something we feel called upon to name, to say sublime, or wilderness, or mystery. Some resonance reaches inside us to an uninhabited place. Uninhabited? There is, says Simone Weil, an impersonal part of the soul. I think something like that part must be the place where the wilderness resonates, where we sense ourselves to be, not masters of creation, not technical wunderkinds, but beings among beings. It is a sense that carries us farther than any humanism, farther than art. It may be experienced as astonishment; it may come tinged with terror. See how lucky we are, how blessed, to inhabit a planet of such infinite complexity; but also—and perhaps simultaneously—see how anonymous we are among these species and genera, how little the scope of our lives in the immensity of deep time.
And is there not a further recognition waiting in this uninhabited place—that the assurance of our connection to the world, its lifetime guarantee, so to speak, lies not in our artful inventions but in our deaths? The experience of wilderness is the call of the duende in the far reaches of the self.”
DON MCKAY
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
Spirit Level is a ten-day writing intensive co-facilitated by writer/editors Stan Dragland & Beth Follett. Spirit Level is meant for writers who think about both the nuts and bolts of writing and about its more esoteric aspects, for those who enjoy interactive group participation, and for those less sure about the benefits of supportive group settings but ready to try. Group sessions will occupy mornings; afternoons will be reserved for writing and/or one-to-one consultation.
Participants will be given opportunities to generate new writing, working with fictional, lyrical and memoir elements, though those who have writing projects in progress will be encouraged to pursue them.
Beth Follett will explore questions of Spirit. Why write? Who writes? What is the nameless that wishes to be named? Where is the wilderness, which Don McKay speaks of, located? Is that what we write out of? How does fear & worry motivate our writing? We will look at ethical and practical concerns such as working with emotionally charged material, managing the inner Hierophant and transforming personal experience into distilled lyric or narrative.
Stan Dragland will stay more on the level. In the belief that writers can never know too much about fundamentals, he will conduct sessions on the alphabet (individual letters), on the word and on the sentence—all basic building blocks of writing, all to be given close attention for their aural as well as conceptual possibilities. He looked up that interesting word “Hierophant” (absent from the Oxford Canadian) and found it to mean “expounder of sacred mysteries.” Which is beyond interesting; it’s where we leap when the level is secure beneath us.
So the approaches of alternating sessions will dovetail.
`.`.`.`.`.`.

Beth Follett is the owner, publisher and in-house editor of Pedlar Press, a Canadian literary publishing house. She is the author of the novel Tell It Slant [Coach House Books, 2001]. She was invited to facilitate the first writing workshop at Los Parronales, in 2005, and is delighted to be returning.

Stan Dragland was founding editor of Brick, a journal of reviews and founder of Brick Books, a poetry publishing house, which he still serves as publisher and editor. He has published three books of adult fiction: Peckertracks, a Chronicle, Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages, and The Drowned Lands. Wilson MacDonald’s Western Tour, a “critical collage,” has been followed by three other books of criticism, The Bees of the Invisible: Essays in Contemporary English Canadian Writing and Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9 and (in NeWest Press’s Writer-as-Critic series) Apocrypha: Further Journeys. His Stormy Weather: Foursomes is a book of prose poems or non-fiction stories, depending on how you cut it, but his dramatic adaptation of Halldór Laxness’s novel, The Atom Station, co-written with Agnes Walsh, is certainly a play.



Recommended Reading (optional)

Margaret Avison, A Sense of Perseverance
Robin Blaser, The Holy Forest
George Bowering, Errata
Robert Bringhurst, The Solid Form of Language
John Cage, Silence
Loren Eisely, The Unexpected Universe
Edward Ethinger, The Creation of Consciousness
Jorie Graham, Overlord
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Murray Stein, At Mid-Life: A Jungian Perspective
FROM "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS