By MARTY LEVINE
A Sept. 12 travelling writing event is aimed at bringing out the writer in all of us and to inspire new perspectives about freedom and democracy and the intersection of personal experiences and civic life.
“We wanted to give our community the opportunity to expand their possibilities of writing,” says School of Education faculty member Khirsten Scott, who is director of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project headquartered at the school.
The event is Pitt’s part in a statewide PA Humanities project called The Window Keeper, timed for this year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (and named after a poem by Philadelphia Poet Laureate Yolanda Wisher, who wrote about America’s founding document as a window that we all must maintain for it to be useful).
The event will include, among its agenda, a stop to the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Carnegie International exhibit, using it as inspiration to write about the “We” in “We the people.” The day will start at 10 a.m. at Pitt's Center for Urban Education. 4303 Posvar Hall, and end at 2 p.m. Sign up here for more details.
The event — a type of writing marathon — is “a staple within the Writing Project,” says Scott, where writers explore local spaces, write together and share their work. “You stop and you write for about 20 to 30 minutes based on the prompt that is provided,” she explains.
And the event is “mostly for people who don’t write for a living,” Scott adds. Its aim is to “take that daunting experience” of writing and make it “communal,” eliminating the challenge of people facing the blank page alone and feeling overwhelmed: “You’re in nature or you’re in a new space. You’ve always wanted to write; maybe you will get inspired from this space” — or this moment.
On Sept.12, the big questions of belonging and of freedom will be central to the writing prompts, she says: “Whose stories help us understand who we have been, where we have come from and who we hope to be as a nation?” The Declaration says, “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’” but what you hold as self-evident “will vary. What is true to you? What do we do with the variety of those stories?”
The event will include not just writing but writing-centered activities, such as erasure poetry and sense-based interpretation. The latter involves incorporating what you hear, see and smell at each stop on the way. Any landmark might speak a story, Scott says; even a passing plane might inspire a tale.
Erasure poetry, on the other hand, “helps you sense meaning based on what you do or you don’t see” in an existing piece of writing. Erasing parts that do not fit in the current text reveals a brand new piece and new meaning, Scott says.
“Anyone who is interested in finding a writing community or a space to explore writing with other folks” is welcome to attend, she says. PA Humanities will publish a statewide anthology from the many Window Keeper writing events, if participants care to submit their results, she notes.
Scott hopes that the event also encourages people to continue writing: “It’s most important that people keep on writing and find a way to connect it to their own lives and also to others’.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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