Craft Intensive: Excavative Writing - Archive, Fragment, Flow (Advanced Section)
For this advanced craft workshop, we’ll read Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project alongside Lisa Robertson’s The River, and examine how excavation operates as both a conceptual framework and a compositional strategy. Together, we’ll explore how writers can work through fragments, traces, and absences to construct meaning across time, space, and material systems.
We’ll focus on how archival and ecological thinking can activate new approaches to form, and on how writers can operationalize concepts such as montage, sedimentation, and flow in their own work.
Craft elements explored will include:
Fragmentation and montage as generative structure
Excavation as method: writing through gaps, ruins, and erasures
Nonlinear temporality (constellation, drift, recurrence)
Site-based writing and the archive as material (urban, ecological, textual)
Surface and material attention (commodities, water, infrastructure)
Hybrid voice: movement between document, lyric, and critical inquiry
We’ll read a short excerpt from The Arcades Project, and analyze how Robertson’s text enacts these ideas through fluid, associative movement, 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 Riverwork and The Arcades Project will be provided and read during the workshop. This workshop is guided by Marissa
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.
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