In Over One’s Head, a hybrid-genre workshop with DIANE GLANCY *IN PERSON*
In person at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design
This workshop will bring together students from MIAD and Woodland Pattern, and will take place at MIAD. Woodland Pattern enrollment is limited to 5 participants. Our staff will meet you at the main MIAD entrance at 273 E. Erie St. and guide you to the workshop site. More details will be offered upon sign-up.
Sometimes when I’m overcome by a writing project, it is a signal to keep going. This happened with my 2021 hybrid collection, A Line of Driftwood, the Ada Blackjack Story. Years ago, I encountered Ada’s diary in the Rauner Collections at Dartmouth College. Ada was a young Inupiat woman who from 1921–23 traveled with four explorers to Wrangel Island in the Arctic Sea to work as a cook and seamstress. She emerged as the only survivor. Imagination took hold and I wrote a poetic narrative from her words. Then I wrote a short nonfiction piece on ventriloquism, and another on a trip to Alaska. And then another on a poetic dialogue between a polar bear and a ptarmigan. All in the same book. What I had was two genres that stayed side by side to become something more. I had discovered a hybrid work through which to guide my own expedition into risk-taking with a book. We will explore the same ocean currents and travel north in this creative writing workshop. A new territory is ahead.
Woodland Pattern co-founder Anne Kingsbury’s beadwork is featured on the cover of Glancy’s A Line of Driftwood, the Ada Blackjack Story. Workshop participants will have the opportunity to view Kingsbury’s beadwork, which will be on display at Then as Now: Woodland Pattern 1980–2022.
Proficient in numerous genres—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting—Diane Glancy often creates work that reflects her Native American heritage. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, to parents of Cherokee and German descent, Glancy has served as artist-in-residence for the Oklahoma State Arts Council (traveling around the state to teach poetry to Native American students), and she taught Native American literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, for almost twenty years. She is the recipient of many accolades, including the 2016 Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book, the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her most recent book, A Line of Driftwood: The Ada Blackjack Story(Turtle Point Press, 2021).
A limited number of scholarships are available for each of our workshops. Writers who are low-income and/or of marginalized identities are particularly encouraged to apply.
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