Last summer I attended an intensive, weeklong postgraduate writing workshop at Vermont College for Fine Arts given by the novelist and memoirist Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog and Townie).
Not surprisingly, of the six participants I was the only lawyer. We met daily to discuss our writing. Dubus supplemented the workshop critiques with writing exercises. He would read a brief poem focusing primarily upon a single sensory perception (sound, taste, smell, physical sensation or vision) and then have us write, spontaneously, about that sensation based upon our experience of the world. We would then read our writing aloud, often uncomfortable about revealing our unedited responses. The spontaneous revelations of subjective perceptions and sensory experiences were emotionally and psychologically compelling.
Jun 1, 2015 6:00 AM CDT
