Craft Intensive: Archival Collage - Echoes, Erasures, and Refractions
In-person craft intensive in East Austin exploring the transformation of archival language through echo, erasure, and refractive lyric strategies. We’ll read excerpts from A Key into the Language of America by Rosemarie Waldrop and Distinguished Office of Echoes by Lisa Olstein. Hosted by East Austin Writing Project (Austin, TX).
Full Description:
This advanced craft workshop examines the transformation of archival and documentary language into lyric structures through close study of Rosemarie Waldrop’s A Key into the Language of America and Lisa Olstein’s Distinguished Office of Echoes. Both texts resist the archive as stable authority, instead activating it through echo, fracture, mistranslation, and formal pressure.
We'll focus on how poems manipulate inherited language through syntax, sound, omission, and structure, and on how ethical tension is embedded in formal choice.
Craft elements explored will include:
echo, recursion, and refractive repetition
erasure and negative space as compositional tools
translation, mistranslation, and semantic drift
destabilizing source authority through form
We’ll read short excerpts, identify each book’s strategies for transforming archival language, and break down key craft elements, including echo, erasure, and refractive syntax, before moving into guided writing time to draft your own archival transformation (poem, hybrid, or prose).
We’ll then critique one writer’s submitted work. This piece will be shared with participants in advance for pre-reading.
This workshop is perfect for:
Poets and prose writers working with archival, documentary, or source-based materials
Writers interested in translation, erasure, fragmentation, and ethical formal experimentation
Artists in Austin’s arts & culture community seeking to interrogate history, language, and power through lyric form
Hosted by: East Austin Writing Project - a literary arts community offering Poetry Club, Craft Intensives, Critique writing groups, and Subculture Lit book club in Austin, TX.
.
.
.
Austin, TX, East Austin, Arts & Culture, Literary Arts, Poetry, Poetry Workshop, Creative Writing, Craft Intensive, Archival Poetics, Documentary Writing, Source-Based Writing, Erasure, Translation, Lyric Experimentation, Hybrid Forms, Research-Based Writing