Painting the Page

How can writing about art provide literary inspiration? What are the paintings, photographs, sculptures and artwork that you obsess over as a writer? How does writing about art expand or complicate both the viewer’s response and the artwork’s meaning? Participants in this workshop will be engaging in the ekphrastic tradition of writing about art, as well as gathering strategies for how the visual arts can inspire future writing projects. We’ll be writing poems and nonfiction that responds to art both real and imagined, as well as reading work by Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Doty, Larry Levis, Lia Purpura, and many others.