I attended the 2022 Spring Writing Retreat at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity online, due to surges in covid-19 cases across Canada.
Although the experience was different online, my time during the retreat was filled with community building with other participants, very helpful mentoring, and time dedicated to working on a project that I hope will one day become my first book.
On one day of our two weeks together, our mentors, Susan Holbrook and Madhur Anand, gave talks on writing with constraint.
Susan’s talk focused on love, and because it was Pi day (March 14th), her exercise challenged us to write a found love poem from a recipe for pie, within a few minutes. I was interested in drawing a sensory, sonorous quality out of the recipe’s language. This was mine:
Madhur, who is both a scientist and poet, challenged us to write found poetry from an article she co-authored, and which exists in the public domain. We again had just a few minutes, and I cannot stop thinking about how surprised I was to find familiar language within the scientific study.
This language, about care, community, and crisis intervention, was threaded throughout the first pages, so much so that I didn’t make it past the abstract within the allotted time. This was my contribution, but styled as erasure instead of found poetry:
This second poem became part of a colloquium paper I gave for one of my graduate classes last week. The process of writing it, short as it was, helped influence my methodology for another project I’ve been working on. The idea that the sciences and humanities could share this language and potentially use it to communicate more effectively with one another suggests a dialectic potential across disciplines that followed readings we had done on interdisciplinarity and generosity (especially Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s “Generous Thinking” and Celia Lury’s “Activating the Present of Interdisciplinary Methods”).