Workshopping binge

[Anonymous]

#921

Like Chrislande, I also was surprised by the description of the very appropriate “active listening” and other techniques outlined in chapter 6 for workshops….none of the other workshops I had ever been in had any sort of organized and sensible tactics like those. The few workshops I had been in at BMCC and Columbia were poorer for it. And as Patrick seems to indicate, it is a bit of the “luck of the draw” when it comes to who you end up sharing your workshop with. It should be said that particularly in the fraught zone of memoir, one is on some level worrying about one’s own turn because of the revelatory nature of what we are doing. I hope though, that Chrislande and Patrick didn’t feel that our workshops were frustrating and that I was helpful to both of them on some level at least—and that they feel that I did actually “actively listen” to them. I certainly got a lot of helpful input from both of them!
It has been fascinating to me to see how all of our pieces have evolved in the process—-Chrislande’s sort of new-journalistic exploration of her disconnected digital dialogue with her estranged father morphed finally to a drastically pared-down poetic form in her plaintive, measured and very beautiful and moving music video. Patrick’s edging around his brother’s death (which greatly influenced my own film about a recently-deceased sibling) progressively honed in on his friend Tom who had gotten him through that bad time, finding, I believe, its most rewarding expression in his film. Both Chrislande and Patrick are wonderful, accomplished writers with deeply expressive and coherent voices and I’m grateful that I was able to repeatedly share the experience with them.
My own recollection of my mother’s post -birth withdrawal evolved shockingly (for me, at least) into that film about my brother’s death. I was a little taken aback that so much of what I did was so dark and depressing in tone though, and so it was great when my fellow workshoppers gave me very positive reinforcement about what I am working on for my last project, a much more gentle and romantic wordless comic strip that is based in large part on what I envisioned in the in-class “felt sense’ exercise.
The only bummer, I’d say, is that it is too bad that our workshops always came at the end of class and so had tight time restraints on them.

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