Craft Intensive: Disrupting the Portrait (Advanced Section)
How do we summon a subject from the inside out?
In our next Craft Intensives workshop, we'll examine how writers and artists move beyond surface description to construct a subject from their inner world, through myth, landscape, hybrid form, and the stories that have gone unseen or untold.
We'll read and view excerpts of Eleni Sikelianos's hybrid memoir You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) alongside the landscape portraiture of Norwegian-Finnish artists Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen, two bodies of work that ask what it means to define a person not by their external facts but by what lives beneath them.
We'll focus on how mythology, environment, and hybrid form can activate new approaches to portraiture and memoir, and on how writers can summon rather than describe, calling a subject into being through invocation, image, and interior attention.
Craft elements we'll explore:
Mythology as self-portrait: how inherited stories shape, distort, and reveal identity
Hybrid form as disruption: how the memoir can hold image, myth, document, and lyric simultaneously
Portraiture as method: how visual and written forms construct, and undo, a subject
We’ll read then engage in a facilitated discussion mapping the texts and works to this month’s theme. Afterward, we'll write using a prompt designed for this month's theme.
We'll then critique one writer's submitted piece. This work will be shared with participants in advance for pre-reading. Look for an email announcement with a Google Drive link.
Excerpts of You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) and the interview + photography of Norwegian-Finnish artists Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen will be provided.
This is an advanced workshop for writers working in poetry, hybrid, and prose.
Teaching Artist: 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