Leaving the beaten path to give voice to transformation: writing workshop

by Bosco Pianetti

Thursday 31 August – Sunday 3 September 2023

Leaving the beaten path to give voice to transformation: a writing workshop in Bosco Pianetti
Curated by Carola Susani and Leonora Cupane.

An intensive residential laboratory dedicated to discovering what we have not yet seen and telling its story. We will observe until we get confused to tell something new.

In Pianetti we find green and intact forests and valleys and burnt and distorted parts of the forest that cry out for a voice and a gaze to be reborn; places inhabited by visible humans and animals and places where invisible life flourishes; wide places and narrow places, cavities, slopes, ravines; we find shadow and light, clearings and tangles of branches and leaves. They are places that hide and reveal stories, they are spaces that bear a wound capable of transformation.

We will go together to discover them. When we go out to discover we bring with us ideas that come from the past, from our lives, from the collective imagination, and create such strong expectations that sometimes we struggle to welcome the novelty of an encounter.
The laboratory aims to try to make space for novelty and make it available for narration. Looking, listening and giving voice revives, reactivates and saves what seems immobile or lost.

Detailed plan

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Friday 9.30-13.00, Saturday 9.00-12.30

Thursday and Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings will be dedicated to observation, to slow discovery. After an introduction that will offer some tools to allow observation to free itself as much as possible from stereotypes, participants will be guided to the perception of relationships: with pavement, grasses, trees, animals, space, people and so on.

We will observe and observe what has already been observed, through unhurried listening exercises, we will perceive with the other senses. Writings inspired by what has been perceived will be solicited, following three paths: descriptive, autobiographical, imaginative. The present places meet with the interior spaces, with the memories of the loved places, with the desires of future metamorphoses. You will have your own bodies, papers, pens and a box available for each participant.

Friday and Saturday, 4.00pm-7.30pm

The afternoon of Friday and Saturday will be dedicated to the discussion of the exercises. Participants will be helped to focus on the news to which they would like to dedicate a story.
We will then introduce the theme of form. Starting from an anecdote by Raffaele La Capria, we will read from Chekhov, from Woolf, from Ortese, from Lispector, from Sebald, from Tuena. We will discuss the form of works by nineteenth-twentieth century authors and contemporary authors, trying to be encouraged to find narrative forms congenial to each of our discoveries. Discovering is an event. How are we going to tell it? We will address movement, which is the heart of the narratives and the starting point of rebirth and metamorphoses.

Sunday morning, until lunch time.

The participants will give shape to the stories, choosing the place that is most convenient for them to retreat to write, and dedicating the time they deem necessary.

We will be able to get up from our desk in the open air to return to the places of our discoveries to question our encounters once again.

Each participant will have a privileged interlocutor in another participant, chosen by drawing lots, who will provide observations and offer new elements during the morning.

Sunday afternoon, 3.30pm-6.30pm

We will read the stories. We will discuss it together, paying attention to the effect. Have we managed to make the novelty of our experience felt? What means did we use? Have we described, have we made characters act? If it worked, why did it work? And if it didn't work, why? How have our stories been nourished by the places explored and can nourish them, how have our interior spaces been enriched, and what transformations have occurred?

Costs

€390.00 all included (full board from Thursday for dinner to Sunday for lunch).

You can come directly from Friday morning, in this case the cost will be €345.

The cost includes accommodation in a double room with a person of the same gender; single rooms are limited in number and you need to hurry to book them, but they require a supplement of €100.

For info and reservations:

Bosco Pianetti, Literary Agriturismo

☎️ +39 377 0994695
📩 info@boscopianetti.it

🏡 Contrada Pianetti (58.58 km) – 90010 Gibilmanna (PA) – Sicily, Italy