Bringing Music Back Alive with Rafi Zabor

By now, generations of us have grown up shaping ourselves to music, to finding in it an answering essence to our essence and its quests. It’s an important area of experience that presents particular challenges to the writer—of fiction, memoir, verse, or some other, hybrid, hybrid form—who addresses it; in fiction one needs not only a descriptive facility but a polyphonic sense of context: of atmosphere and character and narrative urgency, whether explicitly or by some subtlety of suggestion that will enable one to pare things down to the barest hints and indications and still get the sound and spirit of the thing across. No writer will find the one and only way to do it.

These thoughts indicate the nature of the workshop’s intention, via reading classic material, generating new work, reviewing work in progress, addressing a wide range of music and seeking the writerly means that can best convey what we feel most moved to write about it.

We will propose a short reading list and a writing exercise in advance, and hope to see work in progress if you’ve got some, all with the aim of making concentrated use of the available time to hear music in the words and words in the music. If you haven’t got work in progress, and even if you have, I’ll propose a brief exercise in advance, so we can get to know each other beforehand.

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All Levels
Capacity: 20

This workshop will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the first session.