Workshop: Poetics of Relation: Oracle & Guide, a reading and writing workshop with Liat Tzvi Mayer *IN PERSON*

Sat. May 24, 31, & June 7 | 3–4:30 pm CDT | In person at Woodland Pattern

A limited number of scholarships are available for each workshop we offer. Writers who are low-income and/or of marginalized identities are particularly encouraged to apply.

Join Liat Tzvi Mayer in a generative writing workshop reading Édouard Glissant’s seminal book Poetics of Relation. An important work in postcolonial literature and criticism, this book offers a rich network of ideas such as opacity, errantry, creolization, relation and the poetry of “Each and every identity extended through a relationship with the Other.” Those thinking and writing, in prose or poetry, about the geographic, historical, and cultural registers of identity will find this workshop valuable. With Glissant we will open new pathways to sense, new postures from which to connect, and new memories with which we may be transformed. The workshop will invite participants into a reading and writing practice using experimental, collaborative, and somatic approaches to bring the ideas to life, using Poetics of Relation as oracle and guide.  

Liat Tzvi Mayer is a writer with quiet intensity. Born and now based in the land of many mounds on the shores of Lake Michigan, Mayer studied continental philosophy with the spirits of many great thinkers in exile at the New School, and somatics by the foot of a grandmother pine tree in the Wet Mountains in southern Colorado. Her work has appeared in the classic street art book, Stencil Pirates (2004), Keep This Bag Away From Children (2012), The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (2013), Hitting A Wall: Jewish Narratives Confronting the Occupation (2017), and in her 2019 hybrid cultural anthropology Master’s thesis on youth involved in the sex trade, which integrates poetry with ethnography. She creates workshops and readshops on narrative cartography and collaborative survival, as well as community spaces for metabolizing and integrating life’s tough terrain. She has traveled widely often using only a thumb for a vehicle.