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Descriptions of Crescent
Dragonwagon’s Writing-Related Presentations & Short Workshops for
Educators, Arts Administrators, & Arts in Education Advocacy Groups |
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Food, Shelter, Story |
| When
it’s time for budget cuts, art programs are among the first to go. After
all, they are frills --- aren’t they? No, says Dragonwagon emphatically:
the frill is gone, we’re talking necessity here, and it’s time to own
that. |
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Artists, art teachers, and arts administrators are perennially in the
position of trying to sell the arts to skeptical legislators, mainstream
Americans, bottom-line business folks, and conventional educators.
Creativity is described as ingenious problem-solving, a skill
translating to everything from higher test scores to more capable
participation in business, management, and entrepreneurship. The arts
are spun as a bankable amenity to communities, fostering corporate
relocation, rising property values, and economic up-ticks in tourism
dollars. All this is true, but not the whole truth. All this worth
pointing out (all least in some situations). Yet it’s the merest side
effect of art’s inherent power. Which is: the arts are how human
beings pose and answer the essential questions of life. |
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This, not “creative problem solving,” but the way we tell our story,
and must tell our story, in order to live, is the nourishing
well-spring for which we all thirst. If we fail to drink from it,
paradoxically, we sell less efficiently, for what we are offering is not
essential, and those we are selling to still thirst. |
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Crescent Dragonwagon is familiar with pitches for the arts (and has made
more than a few of them herself). In Food, Shelter, Story, she
somersaults accepted paradigms of selling art to the (seemingly)
non-artistic, in the process revitalizing those who do the daily, often
disheartening pick-and-shovel work of art. With passion, humor,
anecdote, and erudition, she travels with us from the cave paintings in
Lascaux to our post-9-11 world, from tales told around campfires to
church parables, from what led us to the arts to “But what now?”
Dragonwagon reminds us of something we already know: that the arts are
indispensable. Celebrate the stories we must tell and must listen to,
the stories that are not only as important as food and shelter, but
which, in themselves, shelter and nourish us. You will be inspired to
set the table, feast, and invite others to the irresistible feast ---
for which we all hunger. |
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Length
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What’s Included;
further notes |
Audience |
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1 hour to 1 hour and
15-minute talk |
45-minute to 1
hour talk, with 15 minutes for Q-&-A. Generally given as a keynote, with
a workshop or two following, depending on conference or convention
needs. No materials needed. |
Artists, arts administrators, arts advocates, artist’s agents and
representatives, arts educators, librarians and curators, non-profit
organization E. D.'s and staff, grant writers. |
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Rollicking Recess |
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A classic
experiential, show-don’t-tell, do-don’t-think workshop, about ¾ of this
hour is given over to direct creative chaos, swooping surprises and
passionate, energetic, interactive play. |
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Rollicking Recess began many years ago when CD began using one-of-a-kind
slips she’d developed, each of which had a title. Students each selected
their own “Fortune Cookie Poem” slip, with no idea what they’d find when
they turned it over. These titles (in combination with nominal classroom
directions) took the emergency brake off for many writers who’d
considered themselves “blocked.” The process was so successful and so
much fun, that over the years, Dragonwagon incorporated ideas and
techniques from improv theater, hundreds of hours with small children in
and outside the classroom, percussion, dance and movement, the visual
arts, teaching adults to write for children, and more, so that the
process became increasingly interelational. |
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Experiential, very hands on, Recess demonstrates directly, not
intellectually, the creative and playful power of using what you
have, where you are, and who you are (and were). You draw your slip
or get your play directions, in some cases you get a character
assignment (and sometimes an inexpensive prop or two or materials), and
you let it rip, in a particular situation) until the timer goes off. A
process of directed freezing and thawing allows the group to
occasionally stop, check out what’s happening, and then return to
playing. |
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Before Recess there’s a brief explanation; after it, there’s a
five-minute cool down which allows the group to transition back to their
more usual selves. Then Dragonwagon leads a discussion that touches on
self-knowledge, resourcefulness, how we learn, what we have and know
that we don’t know we have and know, and how we incorporate all
this into our work. |
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Length
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What’s Included;
further notes |
Audience |
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1 hour |
5 minute intro,
warm-up. 30 to 40-minutes Rollicking Recess, followed by guided
discussion. Generally given as a short workshop, with no more than 30
to 40 people, and usually on the second day of a conference.
Participants are asked to wear loose, comfortable clothes they can move
around in easily. Some materials needed. CD must know in advance
about how many will be attending, and if anyone has physical
disabilities. |
Artists, arts administrators, arts advocates, arts educators, teachers,
librarians and program directors, “blocked” artists, those interested in
the creative process, anyone who needs a break or wishes to surprise
him- or herself. |
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Story: Giving Form & Pattern to Our Chaotic Lives through Art |
| Part
of the pleasure of reading fiction, short or long, is that things
usually come out. Loose ends get tied up satisfactorily. If, as Chekhov
said, it’s mentioned that a gun is hanging on the all at the beginning
of the short story, it must go off by the end. |
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part of the challenge of living is that things usually do not
come out, in the sense of being completed. We enter life somewhere in
the middle of history (that of the world, our countries, our families)
and we leave likewise. In the interim, we try to place ourselves in
context, making sense of often unpredictable, seemingly senseless
events, both good and bad. For, as the anthropologist Ray Rappoport
famously said, “We are meaning-making animals.” |
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a writer, that meaning lies in viewing the rich and troubling events of
life as material. For a teacher of writing, or for anyone who helps
others to explore self-expression through the arts, that meaning lies in
helping those one is teaching to use life as material. |
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what form should that material take--- memoir, autobiography, fiction,
performance? Sculpture, collage, painting? Abstract, literal? And how
can non-writers, as well, use the materials of their lives (memories,
keepsakes, traumas, documents, family stories, photographs, friendships
and hatreds) to give form and pattern to the too-quickly-rushing-by
days? Explore these perplexing questions, and develop some empowering,
outside-the-boxes answers, unique to you and your students, with
Crescent Dragonwagon. Memoir, essay, “liberated scrap booking”, keeping
a journal, working on a family history, recipes, visuals, performance,
and combining elements of all of these are discussed. |
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Length
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What’s Included;
further notes |
Audience |
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1 hour talk |
45-minute talk, with 15 minutes for Q-&-A |
Writers and
readers, book clubs and discussion groups, journal-keepers, scrap
bookers, historians, teachers (especially of arts and writing), arts
advocates and administrators, documentarians, therapists, counselors,
grandparents. |
| 3
hour workshop |
45-minute talk,
15 minutes for Q-&-A, 20 minutes on documents, sources, and
interviewing. Break. Group & individual writing exercises / play.
Students will learn to do a short piece of memoir. Participatory,
interactive. Flip charts and magic markers needed. |
Writers and readers,
book clubs and discussion groups, journal-keepers, scrap bookers,
historians, teachers (especially of arts and writing), arts advocates
and administrators, documentarians, therapists, counselors,
grandparents. |
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Fearless Writing’s Greatest Hits |
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A taste of the weeklong
intensive writing workshop Dragonwagon developed over 20 years ago, this
sampling whets the appetite of would-be writers and others interested in
the creative process. Based on what workshop attendees have told CD
about what Fearless taught them and how it changed their writing
(sometimes their lives), this talk offers a little of what the Fearless
experience is like. Not sure if you’re ready to take a full week’s
class, or if you have it in you to be Fearless? Wonder about changing
entrenched ways of thinking what you do (and don’t do) versus what you
say you want to do? Fearless Writing’s Greatest Hits will get you
started --- not necessarily in writing alone, but in whatever area of
life, personal or professional, you’d benefit from a little more
fearlessness --- satisfying you while leaving you hungry for more. |
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Length
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What’s Included;
further notes |
Audience |
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1 hour talk |
45-minute talk,
15 minutes for Q-&-A. |
Writers and
readers, teachers, librarians, therapists, anyone interested in the
creative process and how breakthroughs occur. |
3 hour workshop
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45-minute talk, 15 minutes for Q-&-A. Group & individual writing
exercises / play. Break. More writing, group & individual. Optional
reading aloud by group members. Participatory, interactive. |
Writers and
readers, teachers, librarians, therapists, anyone interested in the
creative process and how breakthroughs occur. Those who want to write
but think they can’t; those at a transitional or pre-transitional
(“stuck”) point in their lives. |
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©Dragon,
Pen & Inc. 2000-2007 :: Last Updated:
03/05/07 ::