maroon~age

All too often, survival is depicted as a condition that is inferior to thriving and associated with adversity. On the contrary, poet Rudy Francisco writes, “Survival is a ritual,/a ceremony, and/a practice.” Regarding survival as a ritual allows us to consider it not just as an act of “getting by”, but as a set of steps or choices that one invests with the expectation of achieving a spiritual thru-way. In this course, participants will concurrently explore two creative activities, paper weaving and poetry writing, as modalities that mimic the real-world experience of “survival as ritual”.

Paper weaving is the no-fail approach of cutting and assembling strips of paper into a perpendicular, diagonal, or any angle in between “weave”. This process leads the creative mind into a “flow state”, allowing the composition to drive itself intuitively. Poetry is a medium through which we can interrogate our motivations intricately. When practiced together, these activities will reinforce for participants that survival, too, is intuitive and constructive at once.

Each participant will create at least one pairing of a unique paper weaving and a formally or informally structured poem that reveals survival skill as a rich configuration of desires, challenges, and actions.  For paper weaving, participants will be encouraged to make use of everyday household or recycled items (magazine and/or old book pages, packing paper, envelopes, receipts, maps, etc.) that can be gathered without expense and that are likely to be imbued with meta-cognitive significance.

ABOUT JENNIFER

Jennifer Price is an African American, Chicago born poet, visual artist, and former public librarian rooted in the Southern United States.  She has the honor of being a member of Obsidian Literature & Arts’ inaugural O|Sessions Black Listening cohort, and she is a 2023 Teaching Artist trainee of the Community-Word Project.  Jennifer’s work is published in the up//root collective, in Torch Literary Arts’ Friday Feature Series, and in the Kolaj Institute’s rendition of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening.  She holds a bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, a Master of Library & Information Science from the University of South Carolina, and is a certified Georgia Master Naturalist.  Jennifer’s creative practice embraces theory and research along with issues of motherhood and place.