The Writhing Society: A Salon for Constrained Writing Techniques

Sat, Jun 13 2020
10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Virtual

creative writing Virtual Programming writing workshop


The Writhing Society meets to practice and discuss the techniques of constrained writing. We practice the methods invented by ourselves and by other writers, artists, musicians, and mathematicians.

As the Writhing Society gathers on Zoom for a third time, we will explore “100,000,000,000,000 Poems,” a constraint well-suited for the Zoom format. Raymond Queneau had written 10 sonnets with the idea to combine its lines to compose new sonnets. The amount of possible variations he had calculated to be a hundred thousand billion. Discussing his idea with François Le Lionnais led to the founding of the OuLiPo—a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. On June 6, we’ll gather on Zoom, each of us sharing a sonnet line, found or written, and each of us will write down all the lines shared in the order they appear in front of us. We then will apply a “translation” of our choice to these lines to make the collective poem our own, to then share it with each other at the end of the session. Have a dictionary at your disposal. Translations to consider and combine are:

  • homophonic rendering—transforming an original text into a near-homophonic text in the same language: e.g. "recognize speech" becomes "wreck a nice beach."
  • N+7—replace each noun in a given text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary, e.g. replace each nuance in a given theology with the seventh one following it in a dimension.
  • definitional literature—replacing each substantive word in a text, i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, with their dictionary definitions.
  • larding—embellishing a given text by inserting words

Leaders: C. Bardoff, E. Schurink

This workshop will take place online via Zoom. Please RSVP to receive the Zoom link prior to the event.

The Writhing Society combines a class with a salon. In a two-hour session, you can expect a few minutes of introductions and explanations, an hour plus of silent writing, and a half-hour or so in which we will read our work aloud. Then, if there's a little time left for questions and discussion, we'll do that. If you know nothing about writing with constraints, if you do not think of yourself as knowing much about writing, come anyway. No prior knowledge required. This is nothing like your ordinary writing workshop. We work in a relaxed, supportive, playful atmosphere, and we welcome new members.

What are constraints? Constraints are rules, specific and arbitrary, that drive you to say what you hadn’t expected to say in ways you never would have chosen to say it. Constrained writing always involves a collaboration of languages: yours and someone else’s. It allows you to take directions from something outside yourself. In a world where forms of expression thought to be “free” in fact come ready-made from the discourses of powerful groups, composing with constraints becomes a disciplined practice for escape, from these or from oneself, and a source of fresh ideas.