Workshops and Events
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Eno/Ono: How Music and Art Can Enhance Your Writing
Jan 25 and Feb 1, 2025 — two Saturdays
Up Up Books
Time and signup info to come
We seek musical metaphors to enrich our writing, and we use writing to describe musical enigmas.
Through exploring Brian Eno’s and Yoko Ono’s writing as prompts, writing our own, listening to music, responding to guided visualizations, and viewing our writing as musically enriched exercises, we’ll develop new pathways as we shape written memories, poems, or fiction into whatever we consider art. We’ll go outside, improvise collective writing, and share our own pieces aloud at the end of the workshop. Logo c/o Uncomfortable Club.
Offered twice online via Corporeal. Now taught in person for the first time.
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Story Renovation Workshop
Feb. 9 to March 2, 2025 — six Sundays
10 AM - 12:30 PM
The Attic, 1033 SW Yamhill St., Ste 405, Portland, OR 97205
Reframing story “revision” as a renovation can break down barriers of procrastination, frustration, and fears a story will never become “right.” Revision can seem like a punitive step leftover from school to meet a rubric or grade instead of an exploratory step akin to the joys of freewriting. Story renovation means keeping the structure, or bones, and restoring or reimagining other parts through guided word play. Participants will use story drafts to practice hands-on renovation approaches such as highlighting, cutting and taping, and drawing maps, along with generating new passages. We’ll leave with renovation techniques to keep us motivated and engaged and guidance and models from craft experts.
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Grief Spiral: Writing Elegies Along a Curved Path
March 8 and 15, 2025 — two Saturdays
10 AM - 1 PM
Literary Arts, 716 SE Grand Ave., Portland, OR
In this two-part workshop, we’ll explore elegies, or poems of lament, through the lens of spirals. We can use these curved paths to structure poems, such as through recurring phrases or imagery, and to relax the brain while creating literary responses in conversation with death, loss, and transformation. We’ll examine elegies by poets such as Ada Limón, Terrance Hayes, and Sharon Olds, who reference spirals in imagery or form. We’ll draw spirals to generate phrases and ideas, view spiral-based photographs as inspiration, and incorporate movement activities as we generate, share, and revise our drafts.
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Antlers and Beehives: Writing in Natural Structures
April 5 and 12, 2025 — two Saturdays
10 AM - 12 PM Pacific, over Zoom
In this two-part zoom workshop, we’ll explore two forms described in Jane Alison’s "Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative": fractals (antlers) and networks (beehives). This encounter may cause a little brain resistance as you break down inherited rules about “proper” narrative progression. However, the outcomes might crack through writer’s block and generate access to your ephemeral somatic spirit. As Alison writes, “[Fractal and branching] patterns aren’t just around us: they inform our bodies, too. … Our brains recognize and want [these] patterns.”
Now offered for the third time. Second time in 2024: sold out.
Testimonials
“I’m so enjoying your class — the exercises, the journal, the new pathways to writing — thank you for offering it into the world."
—Margaret
"I’d rarely want to take a lab more than once, but I would return because I could get new material from the same portals/prompts, ideas, and leading that you did. This is one of THE best labs I’ve ever taken at Corporeal Writing. Hands down. You are a brilliant teacher."
—Katie
"Alex’s class presentations opened new, imaginative paths to creativity for me using music, poetry, and the work of Brian Eno, Yoko Ono, Matthew Salesses, Michael Ondaatje and other brilliant writers. Alex’s insights are deep, original and funny. I loved the class and will sign up for more."
—Peter
Adoption Passages
An Evening of Stories, Music and Art
Adoption Passages, filmed and edited by Vo McBurney at Open Signal, is streaming on YouTube
In this broadcast, eight performers voice their own truths across cultures and generations. The contents are not suitable for all audiences.
Alex Behr on breastfeeding as an adoptive mom.
After meeting her birth father, Maya Noah deepens her political activism.
Lincoln Kwan Miller creates environmental self-portraits as a search for identity.
Nastashia Minto performs poetry to honor her grandparents.
Ali Maaxa shares synchronous bonds with her newly found birth mother.
William Smith on sacrifices made by his adoptive and birth mothers.
Amy Temple Harper on pretending she’s white.
Ending with music performed by Jo Brickman.
November 2024