Hybrid Writing as Mirror, Canvas, Liberator

Getting from the Ordinary to the Extraordinary: Experimenting with Hybrid Forms in Your Writing.

Writing Workshop with U.S. writer Lisa Taylor

An Gairdín

Portumna, Co Galway

Sunday May 18^th

3− 5pm

Numbers limited so BOOK NOW!

Booking with hickeycommunications@gmail.com  0863195603

Workshop will be followed by readings from three Arlen House writers: Geraldine Mills, Lisa Taylor and Alan McMonagle  at 5.30pm in An Gairdín.

Cost : €10 for the afternoon

Breaking Structure: Hybrid Writing as Mirror, Canvas, Liberator 

Lisa C. Taylor

 Borders are becoming blurred all over the world.  Web videos invade our search for the local weather with their pop-up persistence.  Movies experiment with stories that tell the ending first or offer an omniscient narrator in a voiceover.  Hybrid cars transition smoothly between gas and battery power sources.  Likewise, hybrid narratives contain within either a style or a topic that counters the narrative or the style.  Hybrid writers can blend fact and fiction, poetry and prose, memoir and history, or even art, media, dance, or music.  They can choose to write in a nonlinear fashion as Lidia Yuknavich did in her memoir, The Chronology of Water or they can mix subjects as Annie Dillard did in For the Time Being, a mosaic of topics that included travels in China and Mongolia, the teachings of an 18^th Century Jewish Mystic, and the drama of rocks, rivers, lichen, and clouds as witnessed by scientists, poets, and painters.  Hybrid writers can break up lines, create a collage-like random association of ideas, morph a character into different incarnations as was done with Bob Dylan in the movie, I’m Not There.  These artistic and commercial creations blend and fragment content as an expressive model and reflection of today’s evolving culture.  In this workshop, you will play with form and content, inventing a new way to represent your own emotional truth.

Lisa C. Taylor's poems show the importance of slowing down and paying attention, of listening to others, of asking what the deepest self feels. Taylor knows that the imagination is the most powerful tool we have for transformation. -Ted Deppe