Work from writing workshop Photography to Prose

Led by Girls’ Club Writer-in-Residence Denise Delgado, a group of artists and writers came together to explore new techniques with in the field of contemporary art, photography and prose.

During this 4-session writing workshop, Girls’ Club exhibition Re-Framing the Feminine became both work space and material for jump-starting new writing. Together the class looked at and discussed photographs in the exhibition, exploring their potential use as prompts, subject matter, and imagery.

Below are a couple of new creations made during the workshop:

 

Tina La Porta
www.tinalaporta.net

Image Bank, 2011
sound piece
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Alison Bolah
www.allisonbolah.com

Fiction, 2011/2012
short fiction

Of course it was a lie. “Wherever you go, there you are,” he’d said, when, in
reality, wherever you go, there THEY are. I hear them running around like rats,
scurrying through my thoughts. Shoo! These palm trees outside the bedroom
window, they aren’t green at all, they are every color except the green they are
reflecting. And it all dematerializes. The sky isn’t blue. Blue falls away. I am a
figment of my own imagination. And everything is black space.

It’s a parlor trick. I meditate like this for a minute or an hour and it all falls
away. The pettiness is obvious. The futility. The madness dissipates. But, the
thing is, after the world falls away like that, like a dream, like shaking off a
dream… The crappy streets, The shoddy buildings… I once looked at the wall I
was painting and thought, ‘this paint is not even an inch thick, and the paper
covering sheet rock and sheet rock nailed on studs and insulation and foundation
and this color is nothing! And this building is nothing!’ And I just kept on
painting… Don’t you see? Knowing it’s nothing doesn’t stop the world from
running away with itself.

I like this bedroom window. Ceiling to floor sliding glass doors, they open
onto the shaded corner at the end of the long, wrapping deck. There is Yellow
Tree and Red Rose and White Rose and Bird of Paradise and Elephant Ear. This
is the best corner of the world, I think, crammed with green and yellow, red and
white, orange and purple…

She planted all of them. I watched her haul pots across the faded gray deck
and lug soil while wearing her faded green scrubs and lumpy canvas gloves. With
her golden forearm, she wiped sweat from her brow. The banana tree, she says,
was planted too close to the fence and so will never yield. And Yellow Tree,
planted outside the fence, grew wild and fast – so fast that its mate is now a
stump. I don’t take very good care of them. I don’t water them enough. Green and
Yellow Spotted Bush is dead. She frowns when she see its dried twigs reaching up
from the pot.

With my hand on my belly like this, I can feel my pulse. She told me
there’s a blood vessel under my navel that pumps blood, blood, blood, blood. Up,
up and down, down like a sleeping animal’s, like a stranger whose skin is smooth
skin and whose wiry hair… Up, up and down, down. Like a stranger.

I remember myself as a little girl. I mean, I know myself, I recognize
myself. But that little girl… Round belly and smooth skin and unflinching eyes,
around here, somewhere, closer to the surface than I’d like to admit. Absurdly,
she breaks through and embarrasses me. I’m ashamed; I forget that not
everyone’s little self hangs around as long as mine has. Oh, well.

The breeze is lifting the leaves slowly and they’re falling gently and
scratching the glass softly. I don’t care about god. I care about these leaves and
this window and my skin and my hair. I don’t care whether god designed them or
chance organized them. I don’t care if the leaves are green or every color but
green. But I care about the leaves. I care about the breeze.

This woman once said, ‘the moment you put the blah blah blah on it, you
destroy the whole thing’. She was right.