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May Music Be the Ax Inside Me: Writing As Thinking

The first session in a series of three online workshops hosted by Maya Popa’s Conscious Writers Collective and inspired by French poet and essayist Paul Valery.

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The music that is inside me.
The music that is in silence, in possibility
May it come and amaze me. 

— Paul Valery, Notebook VI, 292 (1916) author's translation

OCTOBER SESSION: WRITING AS THINKING

We will explore Kafka's notebooks, Paul Valery’s notebooks and essays, and excerpts from Norman Manea to consider the role of personal writing in creating a different relationship with the reader. Subjects will include the shape of sound in sentences, embracing inconclusiveness, and analogies to music and composition as an extended metaphor and bridge between concepts. We will also look at Henri Lefebvre's The Missing Pieces and the idea of “ahistory of what is no more and what never was.”