 Join us to write and sip online, just like meeting at the pub to talk shop, but from anywhere in the world! Painted Love: Wine and Art Write Night Saturday February 12, 6 to 8/8:30 pm EST (We end our workshops organically rather than abruptly at 8 pm.) The subject this time is in celebration of Valentine's Day, and we will examine several intriguing artworks from art history on the theme of love. Come ready to write! We'll be using some fascinating love-themed artworks for discussion and as writing prompts, along with creative exercises to inspire your ekphrastic writing practice. The following day, we have Love Stories, an afternoon session. You can come to both events- the artwork and prompts will not overlap. If you're new to ekphrastic writing, join us and find out why we're hooked! In addition to Painted Love and Love Stories, we have upcoming sessions on African-American artists for Black History Month, Women Artists, an ekphrastic flash fiction workshop, and many more. Our workshops are single session events with affordability, flexibility, and diverse schedules in mind. This way you can mix and match. Every workshop is unique (unless otherwise stated) so similar themed events will have different exercises, prompts, and visuals.
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 Mother, by Joaquin Sorolla (Spain) 1895 Morning Breath How many times had she laid in a morning bed, trying to match her breathing to the lungs that worked like bellows just inches away? In the inhales, she has breathed the shallow, quick breaths touched with the smell of cigarettes he just couldn’t quit--the ragged breaths that reeked of grease and denim, flung there over a nearby chair; the contended, deep breaths sour with the open-mouth, open-body smell of sex, or the uneven breaths catching on love wanting to be spent or said, but waiting; lungs pulling and pushing with the smell of clean sheets, soiled sheets, and the wide-window odor of autumn, and the toasted-corn smell of the loyal dog, his breath quick, even in sleep, their animal hearts beating in time together. Here, the yeasty, bready smell of the son, her own curdled milk smell, a perfect pair, a pauper’s supper laid out on linen, which will need a wash soon, cleaned of the crumbs spilled from these mornings. She reaches her hand out to shield the tiny torso, her fingers curved like a second set of ribs, finding the heartbeat in her palm, trying to match the two, mother and son: she must be calmer; she must breathe, and know that she is safe in the way that little heart believes it is safe in its double-ribcage, floating in the the white room, the goosedown-packed comforter warm as a mother’s womb. A heart the size of a plum stone that beats like a caged thing. Her overripe mango of a heart could learn a thing or two; a hand laid on her own chest (how long since a hand laid on her chest?) as if checking for firmness, solidity in that throbbing fruit could break the skin, and sweet syrup drip down to pool at the elbow’s crease. Remember to breathe, remember that, for now, the world is out there, you are here, a hand between that hard little heart and everything else. And though the world would crush it, recall that your heart, too, has endured so far. Goddfrey Hammit Goddfrey Hammit was born and raised in Utah, and lives in Utah still, in a small town outside of Salt Lake City. Hammit has, most recently, contributed work to Neologism Poetry Journal, The Loch Raven Review, and Riddled with Arrows, and is the author of the novel Nimrod, UT. Website: goddfreyhammit.com My Mother Read Szymborska after Light, by Alexander Zyw (Poland) 1957 My mother read Szymborska for Great Books, turned to me the poet, not because she couldn’t comprehend the words she who taught me to read and not because one thing stood for others-- she simply wanted to borrow the book with its grains of sand for an assignment. She had her own window with its own view of a walkway and on the other side, a roof with wild turkeys congregating, and she’d point and laugh at their uneven landings as she stood in the closed porch hands on hips, her hair newly shorn, bangs a bit short, her brown eyes in the afternoon finding the tall tree beyond as it showered itself onto the driveways and carports. She knew from the works of literature what details meant from Ovid to Ray Bradbury she who inhaled languages for opera thirst, yet to our surprise, she pronounced words differently like gulf instead of golf. She would hitchhike through one tome in a night, her appetite uninformed and servanted as if I needed proof of the well laden bookcase in our house Danish modern covering a wall with built-in desk and record album sections. She was like a grain of sand herself yet took almost 88 years to become and pass. And even now she still falls grain by grain for me, even six years after her departure her voice in fragments falls on my shoulders. Laurel Benjamin Laurel Benjamin has poetry forthcoming in Lily Poetry Review, Black Fox, Limit Experience, Word Poppy Press. Find her work in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, Trouvaille Review, The Ekphrastic Review (challenge finalist), California Quarterly, Midway Journal, MacQueens Quinterly, Wild Roof Journal, Tiny Seed, and more. She is an Oregon Poetry Association honourable mention, and is a Sunspot long lister. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Twitter handle: @lbencleo More at https://thebadgerpress.blogspot.com  Untitled, by Bahman Mohassess (Iran) 2010. Assemblage. Published with permission of Rooja Mohassessy and the Estate of Bahman Mohasses. Catch Struck by sun your white-hot heron beak slashes clouds in half separates sky from sea beach from waves water from spray from air the dying from the living Black eye unblinking you fish among us for breath to feed the light You lay us gasping in rows on the sandy shore to dry then fly away when we stand spared Jan Seagrave Jan Seagrave's work appears or is forthcoming in Panoplyzine, San Pedro River Review, Gyroscope Review, Eunoia Review, Reverberations II (ed. Pendergast), Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Redwood Writers Poetry Anthology, Amore: Love Poems (ed. Tucker). Jan has been a writer for universities, a storyteller, and a librarian.  Art by Wenyi Geng (Japan) contemporary Her Planet In the fields, the ground sprouts men. Men in conductor coats water the fields where the ground sprouts men. Men in conductor coats behold a flapping symphony. The fields sprout more men in conductor coats who water the fields. Floods come and deserts dry and men grow gills and men birth scales. This proceeds for thousands of years. Mountains house tombs. Feathers, volcanoes, lakes. From the fields, a woman is born with a book in her hands. She opens the book and from the binding unwinds a star. The star rises to the sky and for the first time, the men in conductor coats halt the watering of the fields and watch. The woman flips through the pages, stargazes. When she reads, her cape shakes. By morning, the men in conductor coats no longer water the fields. They wait in line for the woman to sleep. They bring balloons on strings to tie to her teeth. Those that pop launch floods. Those that float know God. The more the woman reads from her book, the faster trees sprout out of her mouth. The first cloud appears inside of her house. She is alone eating dinner. She tries to write on it with chalk. Everything is leaking, she writes. It's how she likes to see. Benjamin Niespodziany Benjamin Niespodziany's writing has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50, Fence, Salt Hill, The Indianapolis Review, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net. He works nights in a library in Chicago.  Meg and Lorette have an animal themed ekphrastic microfiction workshop coming up! This one is a four day, asynchronous workshop online. Click here for more information or to sign up!
 detail, The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlands) 1480-1505 Membrane With Veins My body retained the palmaris longus. Hers didn’t. “I’m more evolved,” she laughed, putting our hands next to each other, tapping on the tendon with the tips of her fingers – “You know they will take it out, if you ever need spare parts?”. Other than that, we were analogous – both in height and in weight. Our marathon BPs were only two minutes apart. After one year, we decided to move in together, and we hung the image of that couple from Bosch’s painting over our bed. But then, we couldn’t agree if the sphere is made of glass with cracks, or if it is a membrane with veins. From that point on, I asked her to sleep on the side closer to the door, which, to my disappointment, brought us both more comfort. Michał Choiński Michał Choiński (he/his/him) teaches American literature at the Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland). He has written two academic books - his latest monograph, Southern Hyperboles came out with LSU Press in 2020. Choiński's debut pamphlet Gifts Without Wrapping was published by Hedgehog Press in 2019. His poems and translations of poetry were published in journals in Poland, in the UK and in Canada. In 2022, he'll be at Yale University, as a Fulbright Fellow, writing his next book.  We recently met Mary Hall Surface when she attended one of our online writing workshops here at The Ekphrastic Review. I recognised her name as a teacher from the Smithsonian series of art history online, where she teaches ekphrastic writing. Mary Hall was kind enough to join us in an interview about her ekphrastic teaching and work. The Ekphrastic Review: How did you discover the joy of ekphrastic writing? Mary Hall Surface: I created a multi-media solo performance inspired by the work of the American artist Alexander Calder, which launched my interest in writing plays inspired by art. That project was followed by two plays based on the entire body of work of an artist, first Edward Hopper and then Roy Lichtenstein. My other three ekphrastic plays are inspired by a single work of art (Portrait of my Grandmother by Archibald Motley, Jr. and The Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial by August Saint-Gaudens) and by an innovation within an artist’s practice (the cut outs of Henri Matisse.) In 2015, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, which had produced three of my art-inspired plays, invited me to launch a public program called “Writing Salon.” The in-museum sessions were devoted to approaching art as an inspiration for creative writing and embracing writing to deepen connection to visual art. Envisioning, researching, and scaffolding the writing prompts for these 2 – 3 hour workshops completely captivated my imagination. Now I centre virtually all my teaching artist work on my life-long love, visual arts, as inspiration, whether focused on the craft of writing, on reflection, or on strengthening empathy. In what ways does art history enrich our lives as writers or as readers? Exploring art through the ages engages us with how humans have responded to being alive. Art history, which is an ever-unfolding conversation across centuries and cultures, is shaped by essential questions: How and why do we capture what we see and experience? On what do we place meaning? What do we celebrate as beautiful? These questions are central to a writer’s practice, too, no matter our genre. So, art gives writers another medium through which they can question, wonder, wrestle, and perhaps even discover what matters most to them. Moreover, experiencing how artists choose their visual vocabularies (their colors, lines, shapes, tones, compositions) offers an enriching parallel for writers to consider the choices we make as writers. How do you compose the colors, shapes and tones of a sentence, a paragraph, a story? What’s the best way for someone new to the concept of ekphrasis to approach an artwork? I begin all my workshops with taking a close, slow look at the work of art. I ask you to hold back that overwhelming human urge to immediately know or assign meaning or spin a story about the work of art. Rather, I am eager for writers to first take in all the visual information, so that they will have the largest possible imaginative canvas from which to work. After taking that close look, I suggest you begin to wonder; that is, to ask big questions about the work, questions without one answer. Our wonders fuel our writing. Then follow a wonder into a description, or a story, or a poem or… so many possibilities. What are some of your favourite kinds of art or artists for ekphrastic writing? Why? I design my creative writing workshops to focus on specific aspects of writing which I pair with a work of art. Obvious choices include portraits to explore character and landscapes to explore setting. But a key to my workshop process is that I often use the lens of the artist’s life and times to shape the prompts. For example, when working with Edward Hopper’s People in the Sun for a workshop devoted to multi-layered narratives, we looked through the lens of Hopper’s fascination with travel to imagine the journeys, both literal and metaphorical, of each of the figures. We then looked through the lens of Hopper’s love of the cinema to imagine what movie of their life a figure might be watching. How does teaching ekphrastic writing for a museum compare and contrast with independent workshops or teaching elsewhere? Does the experience or audience change, and if so, how? I will admit to still being starstruck when I stand beside a work of art in a museum to teach. The participants seem to share in the pleasure and power of being in the presence of the painting or sculpture, which lifts the whole writing experience. But until the time comes to return in-person, I try to convey that heightened experience online whether working through museums, with educators, or presenting workshops independently for a diverse audience. Happily, I have found that some participants thrive in the online setting. Particularly in a reflective writing workshop, some writers go to a deeper place in the comfort of their own desk. Mary Hall Surface is an award-winning playwright, theatre director and teaching artist who leads creative writing and reflective writing workshops inspired by visual art. She works as a National Kennedy Center Teaching artist and was a six-summer faculty member at Harvard’s Project Zero Classroom. She currently teaches online through Washington DC’s Smithsonian Associates, National Gallery of Art and more. www.maryhallsurface.com.  Starry Night, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1889 Don't forget, you can always find the latest prompts, challenges, and responses at the menu item above that says Ekphrastic Writing Challenges.
Click on image for details about how to enter our latest ekphrastic challenge for Van Gogh's Starry Night. For this challenge, we will be making an ebook with the selected entries for our readers to distribute freely, hopefully inviting more readers to The Ekphrastic Review and our writers! Click on stars above for more information.  Untitled, by Marian Spore Bush (USA) 1930s? The Night Stork On cloud-like wings white in the moonlight The night stork comes to steal babies With white eyes it stalks the black sky Peering into the village below Ears tuned to infant cries Talons sharp beak wide Saliva drops like rain on the rooftops Of the houses With blackened windows And blackened doors Hollow eyes and silent mouths Desperately whispering No one lives here. August van Stralen August van Stralen lives in British Columbia with her wife and cat Gordo, who’s favourite activity is to get out of bed early in the morning and howl for attention from the living room. When she’s not writing, August enjoys crochet, woodworking, and long walks with her wife. |
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