Workshop 8:

Writing Workshops, Art, and Community in COVID-19

Saturday 17 April 2021 ~ 2:30 - 3:30 pm Pacific

Recording available here (60 mins)

Bring a pen, paper, and any art supplies you might enjoy!

Nathan Renshaw

Anne Geisz

Alex Kinnaman

In Doing Time, Writing Lives, Patrick Berry writes, “reading and writing construct a contextual now that we all can inhabit” (14). In the space your conference will bring we propose a theoretical, visual, and storytelling based panel to discuss and share the potency of art. We will share how, in the moment of our workshops, the imaginative and transformative power of art, storytelling, and poetry creates a creative and imaginative challenge to mass incarceration.

We facilitate writing workshops with the Speakout! writing program: a community-centered literacy project in Northern Colorado that sponsors and publishes the writings of confined persons in a twice-yearly journal. Weekly workshops inspire much of this writing. During these workshops, narratives, voices, and ideas come together. The power of this performative act (whether shared or held close), we argue, lives not only in the potential pages of a journal, but also within the bodies, minds, and communities of those who experience the “now” of the words performed, a muscle memory carried forward into future hours, months, and pages penned by the “beloved community.”

COVID-19 has muffled our ability to invoke the “beloved community” due to the distance technology places on our workshops. In the course of this small panel we wish to focus on the importance of the inherent power this space still holds.

A note for the audience: bring a pen, paper, and any art supplies you might enjoy!

Nathan Renshaw is a writer from Longmont Colorado. He studied English Literature and World Philosophies and Religions at Colorado State University. He is aiming at a Master’s in English Lit. and is learning the grant writing trade with his cousin’s food-justice non-profit: Kaizen Food Rescue. He has worked with CSU’s Community Literacy Center for 2 years. Fresh out of undergraduate, he presented his research on bibliotherapy and melancholy last December to a global conference based in Poland.

Anne Geisz is currently a senior at Colorado State University as an undergraduate in Fine Arts with a concentration in ceramics and psychology. This is her 2^nd year working with the Community Literacy Center and 1^st year serving as an intern for SpeakOut!. She is currently in the process of selecting a program to receive her Master’s degree in Counseling and Art Therapy and looks forward to exploring the many benefits of creative work for all populations.

Alex Kinnaman is a junior at Colorado State University majoring in English Education and Literature. His interests as they relate to his community literacy work involve the nuances of meaningful writing, and the power of the act of engaging deeply with literacy, as it takes place within the context of the writer, and the stories they work to find themselves within.

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