“It, Me, You, Us” Lecture Series

The Writing Center is very proud to be co-hosting “It, Me, You, Us: Close Encounters with Interpretation,” a series of lectures exploring varied ways of writing about and engaging with art, with an emphasis on the sensory, the subjective, and the shared. Why? Because experiencing art, thinking about art, and talking about art are all essential aspects of writing about art.

Don’t miss Mira Schor, one of our very favorite artist-writers, on October 16. And in the meantime, visit her blog, A Year of Positive Thinking.

Mira Schor, Portrait of My Brain, 2007. Oil on linen, 16 x 12 in.

A Look Back, A Leap Forward

What a wonderful year it has been for the RISD Writing Center. We’ve taken on new ventures and participated in engaging events, from public speaking workshops and Grad Thesis Writing Retreats to a full day of exploring ekphrasis and our series of Readings in the Writing Center. It’s been a pleasure to collaborate with faculty, staff, students, and guests, and we want to thank everyone who could be part of it.

Now that it’s summer, we’re looking ahead to 2014-15, and we’ve got plenty in store: we’ll be continuing our support for the RISD writing community and continuing to build on some of this year’s new endeavors, but we’re also expanding in exciting new ways. Here’s a sneak peek at what we’re planning and what we’re reading.

This summer, we’ll be considering new perspectives for tutors, especially in terms of collaborative learning and social justice. These readings will help us train tutors as leaders and as allies, both in the work they already do and in new approaches:

— Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors
— bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress
— Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
— Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change

This coming year, the RISD Writing Center will expand its tutoring to include writing, public speaking, and visual rhetoric for all RISD composers. In preparation for this big step toward multimodal composition, we’re looking at the following books:

— Sohui Lee and Russell Carpenter’s Routledge Reader on Writing Centers & New Media
— N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis
— David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel’s The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric
— Le Odell and Susan M. Katz’s Writing in a Visual Age
— Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground
— Mathieu Borysevicz’s The Book About Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground

As always, we’re keeping in touch with critical conversations around writing, art, and design. These texts are our latest finds on the topic:

— Noel Carroll’s On Criticism
— Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum’s On Not Knowing: How Artists Think
— Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing

We wish you good summer reading, too, and look forward to seeing you all in the Fall.

Spring Break Grad Thesis Writing Retreat

This Spring Break, you don’t have time to lounge on a beach in Mexico or binge-watch House of Cards. This year, you’re working on your graduate written thesis. But you do deserve a break — an opportunity to put away distractions and focus on writing. You deserve a day or two at the Spring Break Grad Thesis Writing Retreat.

Check out the poster for details and RSVP before it fills up.

The Event of (Y)Our Dreams

One whole afternoon. Three events. Writing inspired by art. Art inspired by writing.

It's SHOW TELL/TELL SHOW: A Half-day of Events on the Subject of Ekphrasis. And it all takes place Thursday, February 6, 2014. Check out the poster below for details, and get ready to dive into what we’re all about.