Good.
Well, these are some good-- these are some good ideas
to start with.
I mean, to me, this is sort of the most important thing,
if you're going to pick a place that you
want to interrogate or install a thing in, is to have
some kind of tension with that.
You should have, not necessarily a dislike,
but it should be some kind of electricity that will perhaps
generate something for the work that you're
writing against something.
So I got a couple questions for each of these spaces.
Then I'm actually going to ask you to write for a little bit.
I did promise this would be a partially generative workshop,
or wholly generative, perhaps.
So a couple of questions to think about when
we're thinking about spaces.
One is what do the readers want?
What do the viewer want?
What do the viewers want in this space?
What are they looking for?
I think that's important.
Because if what we want is to be read,
is to get this in front of readers,
how do we convince readers to click on our thing
or to like our thing or to promote our comment?
And how-- which is to say, what are they here for?
What do they want?
Are we here just for entertainment?
Are we here-- are we here trolling for sex?
Are we looking for people that may have noticed us
and posted a missed connection of us?
Or, this is one of my favorites.
Do you know this?
Jennifer Knox.
She's [? an interesting poet ?]]
Corgis, they're everywhere, and yet, nowhere at all.
While many people believe they have seen a Corgi
or said the word Corgi, or the plural form, Corgum,
only a handful of very enlightened people
know that a Corgi is a dog, and quite unlike any other living
thing on Earth.
Corgis are the product of millions of years of evolution.
things making love to other things--
sometimes very sharp things with teeth, but that's
bound to happen.
Corgis are the big--
So it's Jennifer Knox.
She's an interesting poet.
You should check out her poem, Chicken Bucket,
which is a really, pretty excellent poem.
I mean, she does these videos on YouTube.
And most of them have 500 hits, or something like that.
But this one has 270,000 hits.
Can anyone guess why that might be?
Corgis.
Her dogs.
Yeah.
It's a pet related, and certainly corgi related,
and actually has photos of corgis
and this sort of bizarre, fake history--
fake scientific history of corgis.
But again, if we're looking to-- she's very successfully
hijacked a reader in this.
People will keep watching.
They will listen to whatever she has
to say as long as there are photos
of cute pets on the screen.
Whether or not that's useful for the thing
you want to write here or not is anyone's guess.
But if you're looking for readers,
you know-- because 270,000 hits is a lot for a poet.
So we're looking at these.
Or the other question is, if we don't want to hijack readers,
but we would like to get-- we just
like to put our things in these places and get our readers,
or readers that find our work in say a literary magazine online,
and we want to get them to come to-- actually to come
to our work in these places, how do we get them there?
Which is a sort of big question-- website, blog.
There's Twitter, Facebook.
There's a lot of ways of doing that.
But you're like, I'd like to write for a while.
And so, this is our job.
I'm going to give you 10 or 15 minutes here
to just generate some text.
And if you need a pencil, we have, apparently,
a lot of pencils up front.
What I'd like you to do is to choose your-- you choice
in a space.
If you had a laptop, you're welcome to do this on a laptop.
If you prefer to do a hard copy, that's totally fine.
But I would like you to consider a space, digital space,
or his bathroom stall is fine if you prefer
like a sort of analog space, you know, a meat space, I guess,
in multiple ways, then you're welcome to do that.
But I'd like you to think of what a space.
Think about why people are there and what either might keep them
there or might draw them there.
And I'd like you to--
I mean, if you have access to it,
it should be a space that you know somewhat well.
What is this space like?
What do people post in this space?
And I'd like you to then start just
playing with some language.
I want you to write.
I'm going to make you write a draft or something.
It doesn't have to be very good.
And no, you don't have to share it.
But I want you to start something that is
in response to that space now.
You have 10 or 15 minutes or so.
We'll see how you're doing.
I'd like-- you could use whatever material is there
already if you think you have a particular space.
If you're thinking of-- if you want to use missed connections,
if you know what missed connections is,
you probably read missed connections
and you have a good sense of what people post on there.
It's like you were the hot girl with the car.
You want to party or something.
But I'd like you to generate at least three chunks of text
in the next 15 minutes.
It doesn't matter how good it is.
I just want you to start something.
Three chunks of text that have to be related in some way.
So it could-- a chunk of text could be a stanza.
That's fine.
It could be a draft of a small thing.
It doesn't really matter.
But the chunks have to be related,
because they're going to be put in sequence.
OK?
So you going to generate three chunks of text.
They could be the same speaker.
They could be two different speakers in a conversation.
They could be related by the space.
It doesn't really matter how you think about that.
So I'll give you a 10 or 15 minutes just to write.