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Association: Finding the Repeated Elements Trying to Talk to Each Other

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SOLD OUT
IN PROGRESS
Tuesdays, 4 weeks
Oct 1
-
Oct 22
6:00 - 8:00PM CT
INSTRUCTOR:
Adria Bernardi
LOCATION:
The Porch House at 2811 Dogwood Pl., Nashville, TN 37204
$
207
FOR MEMBERS
$
243
FOR non-MEMBERS
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“I really want to repeat myself, just to annoy people.” Clarice Lispector, “Brasília.”

As in processes of memory, reverie, and daydreaming, the insights and understanding that arrive while revisiting a work-in-progress usually surface, not through processes of logical thinking, but through associative thinking. This workshop will be dedicated to finding and expanding associated and repeated elements over the course of work––specifically images, sound patterns, phrasing, and themes––already present in a work-in-progress in order to discover how they’re associated with each other, talking each other, and then by experimenting with and expanding these associated elements to better understand to the overall form. Throughout the workshop, we’ll be discussing Clarice Lispector’s story, “Brasília,” a marvel of associative thinking––with its zigs and zags, digressions, and the disappearances and reappearances of the elements within it. This workshop is open to writers who are in the process of revising a work of fiction, nonfiction, or a work in hybrid form.

In-Class Writing Lift: Heavy

Homework: Required

Workshopping Drafts: Intensive

Adria Bernardi is a writer and translator whose novel, Benefit Street, was awarded the 2021 FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Award and published by The University of Alabama Press.  She is the author of two other novels, a collection of short stories, a collection of literary essays, an oral history, and eight translations from the Italian.  Adria has been awarded the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the Raiziss/DePalchi Translation Award.  She has taught fiction-writing at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.  She lives in Nashville.

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