Craft Intensive: Ruin as Form: Land, Body, & What Persists ( Advanced Section)
What remains when a body is erased from the record?
In our next Craft Intensives workshop, we're reading Giada Scodellaro's Ruins, Child alongside Jane Blocker's Where is Ana Mendieta? Two texts that treat land, ruin, and the earth-bound body not as backdrop but as the condition under which women's bodies have been lost, inscribed, and sometimes recovered.
We'll move between Scodellaro's prismatic, choral prose, set against the Hutchinson River salt marshes and crumbling architecture, and Blocker's critical and lyric reconstruction of Ana Mendieta's earth-body performances. Together, these texts ask how we write toward absence, how ruin functions as both subject and form, and what it means to treat haunting as a structural force on the page.
Craft elements we'll explore:
Writing toward absence: meaning made from omission and loss
Haunting as structure: how what persists shapes a text
Ruin and accumulation: fragment as its own wholeness
Identity as unstable ground: how both texts resist fixed categories of self, body, and belonging
The silueta and the choral voice: prismatic arrangement as a form of imprint and disappearance
We'll read and listen closely to excerpts from both texts, analyze how each writer enacts these ideas through radically different but resonant approaches, and break down key craft strategies before moving into guided writing time to generate new work (poetry, hybrid, or prose).
We'll then critique one writer's submitted piece. This work will be shared with participants in advance for pre-reading.
Excerpts of Ruins, Child and Where is Ana Mendieta? will be provided and read during the workshop.
This is an advanced workshop for writers working in poetry, hybrid, and prose.
Guided by: Marissa Ayala
Marissa Ayala is an Austin-based writer, researcher, and artist. She is the recipient of the 2026 In Cahoots writing residency, the 2025 Puffin Foundation environmental artist advocacy grant, and held a 2025 residency at Chulitna Lodge in Lake Clark, Alaska. She is the founder of the East Austin Writing Project, a 2026 recipient of the City of Austin Elevate grant. Marissa's work appears in Poets & Writers magazine, Fugue, TELEPHONE, Pen + Brush, and more.
She earned a BA at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, an MFA in Fiction at The New School, and a Master of Science at Hunter College.
East Austin Writing Project - a literary arts community offering Poetry Club, Craft Intensives, Critique writing groups, and Subculture Lit book club in Austin, TX.
This project is supported in part by the Elevate Grant of Austin Arts, Culture, Music, and Entertainment.
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Austin, TX, East Austin, Arts & Culture, Literary Arts, Poetry, Poetry Workshop, Creative Writing, Craft Intensive, Lyric Experimentation, Hybrid Forms, Theory-Based Writing