Rachel DeWoskin

Truth & Beauty: Telling our Stories in Writing that Moves and Matters

How do human beings convey the stories that matter most to us? 

In this interactive presentation and workshop, we will talk about reading, writing, traveling, listening, and imagining, all as ways to freshen and widen our perspectives. Connecting to one another through stories, poems, and conversation will help us determine what we mean by truth in a moment when the notion and word are contested. 

Together, we will explore poetic/philosophical truth along with "objective truth," and make mini wonder books, lists of questions and ways to approach exploring those questions through writing. We will examine how art and writing can be fueled not by what we know, but instead by what we ask. We will keep our world views—and expressions of our experiences—kaleidoscopic. 

Participants will write something—anything from a single line or list to a poem or scene—that feels beautiful and therefore true, or true and therefore beautiful. 

Audience Recommendations

This presentation can be tailored for audiences from 5 to 500 people, and for ages from 12-100. This can be an intimate workshop or a large-scale presentation and works for young people as well as adults. It might be of particular interest to travelers, essayists, poets, fiction writers, activists, teachers, community groups, book groups, and any/all readers.

Program Logistics

This is an hour-long program, which can either include or be followed by a twenty minute Q&A, depending on the wishes of the host. The presentation begins with a short slide show that includes a childhood story, some thinking by James Baldwin, Edwidge Danticat, Margaret Atwood, and Virginia Woof, two original poems, and a prompt: make a list of everything you've ever wondered. How many of your own questions can you remember, and what must you now add to those?"

After the prompt, we will write together for ten minutes, and then talk about our lists, spinning some of the questions into stories of where we've been, what experiences can be considered universal, what we've read, hoped, imagined, and wondered, and how to connect across whatever threatens to divide us. This will help us land on ways to make work that reaches and resonates with other human beings, and to examine why we get a shiver of recognition when we read or hear a story we know is "true" in the deepest sense of the word. 

Participants will have a chance to read what they've written, and to connect across experiences, expressions, and stories. It's helpful if the host provides a microphone and projector that are compatible with a MacBook Air). Recording of the program is welcome, if it's okay with all audience members.