Organized by Image journal every summer, the Glen is equal parts craft workshop, arts festival, and spiritual retreat. It’s framed by the Christian tradition but welcomes spiritual wayfarers of all stripes. This year, due to the pandemic, it’s entirely online, with twelve different classes on offer, taught by renowned artists, writers, and critics. Visit https://imagejournal.org/the-glen-workshop-2021/ for more information.
“The last year has invited many of us into a thicker relationship with place: with the homes where we quarantine, the public spaces we navigate with new caution, the vacation destinations we dream about, and the neighborhood streets we walk to avoid going stir-crazy in the meantime. Even our computers have transformed from objects to places, ushering us into the homes of loved ones, yoga studios, concert halls, museums, and countless other virtual gatherings, including the 2021 Glen Workshop! This year we’ll be exploring the ways in which our surroundings feed our creative vision. And we’ll also consider how art—both making it and sitting with it—sharpens our capacity for attention to the places we live and move and have our being.”
Each class costs $950 and is open to all experience levels. The schedule is such that attendees can choose just one. Registration to any class gives you full access not only to five days (about three hours each) of expert instruction, in-depth conversation, and practice, but also to additional programming that includes faculty presentations, “experiments with poetry and place” with artist in residence Billy Mark, chapel services led by musician Charles Jones and chaplain Marilyn McEntyre, coffee hours, open-mic nights, centering prayer sessions, and yoga sessions. Again, it’s all online.
If you don’t want to register for a class but want access to the other content or just a sneak peek, there are “retreat registration” and “festival pass” options. Click here to view registration options. You can get a 25% off discount if you register in a group of three or more.
What follows is a full list of the workshops (hands-on, craft-based classes) and seminars (immersive, discussion-based classes). I’m considering registering for either the Rosen seminar on contemporary biblical art or the Overstreet seminar on film. The cost is reasonable, but it’s still high, so I have to see if I can make it work.
Workshops
“Poetic Text as Provocation” with Scott Cairns: “We will embrace an approach to poetry that privileges poetic text as a scene of meaning-making, distinct from any approach that would understand the poem as a site of meaning already made. We will begin most days with a reading of a great and provocative poem and discuss the provocations each of us registers in response to that poem. Then, we will share our works-in-progress, and each of us will offer our ideas about what might make each draft a richer, more suggestive, provocative occasion for the reader.”
“The Attention We Owe Each Other” with Shane McCrae: “It is important to almost every poet to find a community of fellow poets with whom they can share their work, and from whom they can expect serious and good-humored attention, and honest and direct critiques. Together, we will make that community. Our poetry workshop will not operate according to any particular idea save the idea that poetry is serious—that it is, in fact, among the most serious things in our lives—and that, consequentially, we owe each other seriousness, and intelligence, and sensitivity when we workshop each other’s poems. We will read and critique each other’s poems closely; we will prioritize whatever particular issues each poem asks us to prioritize while keeping in mind the issues its author has asked us to consider; and we will have fun together, the highest seriousness being joy.”
“Writing the Moveable Feast” with Alissa Wilkinson: “Food is what binds us together as humans. We all eat it. We all make it, or someone makes it for us. We all have opinions about it and preferences for it, which often come from the things that make us, well, us: our families of origin, our nationalities and ethnicities, our individual tastes, our beliefs about God and ethics, and our access to it. Food is the gateway to every aspect of human life; when we eat it, we’re participating in history, culture, and the economy.
“Feasting is one of the most important activities we can do as people. It’s an act of community-building, celebration, and even resistance to the forces that try to tear us apart. Many religious and spiritual traditions are built around feasting; the Bible ends at a wedding feast.
“So in this class, we’re going to talk about food, think about food, make food, and eat food. We’ll talk about how writers have interacted with food and food writing. We will try to understand what it might mean to feast together even when we can’t actually be together. And then we’ll do our own food writing, with the goal of exploring that common experience through our writing (in any genre).”
“Strange Countries: Writing the Inner and Outer Journey” with Fred Bahnson: “In sixth-century Ireland, groups of monks began the practice of peregrinatio, “going forth into strange countries.” The peregrini set off alone or in small groups in tiny coracles made of willow and animal hide, abandoning themselves to the winds and currents of the North Atlantic. A journey into the unknown.
“We moderns find it difficult to grasp the enormity of such an undertaking. Given how frequently we travel, we barely notice the existential threshold crossed upon leaving home. The peregrini remind us that we go on pilgrimage not to consume experience, but to be consumed. To feel again the porous borders between our inner and outer lives. If our rational age has obscured what Seamus Heaney called ‘a marvelous or magical view of the world,’ pilgrimage helps us find it again.
“In this class we will take a very ancient metaphor—the journey—and use it to explore our lives in the age of climate change, pandemics, and fragile democracies. We’ve all gone forth into a strange country, a journey in which we measure distance in time and cortisol levels rather than miles. Setting off in our coracles of narrative—essay, memoir, literary journalism, travel writing, nature writing—we’ll use our peregrinations to map our inner lives against the great stories of our age. We will write our physical journeys (working from memory), and we will write about shelter, intimacy with place, our yearning to be at home. As we traverse the continuum between pilgrimage and place-making, we will discuss various craft topics of literary nonfiction: form, character development (including place-as-character), narrative arc, and, perhaps most important, how to create the fictional ‘I’ that is your nonfiction narrator.”
“The Landscape of the Lyric Essay” with Molly McCully Brown: “The lyric essay combines the density, muscle, and music of the poem with the expansiveness, narrative momentum, and overt desire to engage with information of the essay form. Tied to the original notion of an essay as an effort, a trying, an attempt at making sense, its combined allegiances to the fragment and the whole, the actual and the imaginative, the image and the story, make it the perfect form for exploring and charting the landscapes—both exterior and interior—that make and mark our lives.
“Designed as an opportunity for poets craving a little space to move around, for essayists hungry to drill down to the core of language, or for any writer longing for a chance to experiment, investigate, and attempt, this generative workshop will serve as an introduction to the associative logic of the lyric essay and a chance to try your own hand at the form.
“In class we’ll read and unpack lyric essays from a variety of writers; work together to identify some unique features and possibilities of the form; write in response to prompts designed to help us explore a variety of geographical, sociological, emotional, and intellectual landscapes; and share and discuss our work as it develops. My hope is that you leave the workshop with many attempts and beginnings which might prove fertile ground for later work, and with at least one piece that feels more complete, or further along in its development.”
“Writing Research-Based Narratives for Young Adults” with Marilyn Nelson: “Our curiosity can nourish our reading and our writing, which can nourish the curiosity of our young readers and encourage them to ask questions and follow their own research paths. In this class we will examine some books recently published for middle-grade and young adult readers and based to varying degrees on historical events, asking what questions led to the necessary research, how the research was conducted, and how the material was organized and presented so it is appropriate for younger readers. How do we write for younger readers? How might an author write over their heads? How might an author write down to them? What questions does an author allow to linger? How much information is too much? How does an author find the right voice?”
“Developing Your Authentic Voice” with Charles Jones: “This workshop will focus on teaching artists how to bring their authentic selves to the craft of songwriting and successfully communicate what they want their audiences to hear and feel. We will listen to the music of some of the greatest songwriters of all time and examine what we feel when we listen back. We will explore why we connect deeply with some music, look at the connective tissue these masters created in their songs, and learn how we apply these techniques and tools to our own craft in service of our own unique stories and voices.”
“The Creative and Spiritual Practice of Calligraphy” with David Chang: “From the practical to the ethereal, writing a letter by hand offers a deeper connection to the text and to the viewer. We will cover both aspects of the art form of calligraphy as we learn the basics—including developing your own personal handwriting style—and learn to use handwriting as a creative practice that can also forge a deeper spiritual practice. Through meditational writing we will explore the art of handwriting as a tool for personal expression and as a means to connect with ourselves and also with others.”
“Landscapes and the Art of Seeing” with Suzanne Dittenberg: “In Sargy Mann’s article ‘On Cezanne’ he opposes the popular notion that Paul Cezanne was intentionally distorting the landscape through superimposed affectated abstraction, re-tooling visual information to titillating effect. Instead, Mann makes the case that Cezanne’s painting practice was more straightforward. He describes Cezanne as a relatively unremarkable draftsman who gave himself intensely to the act of looking. ‘As dedicated a realist as you could ever find.’ In Cezanne’s letters, we are given a window into his motivations when painting. He writes, ‘Now the theme to develop is that, whatever our temperaments or power in the presence of nature may be, we must render the image of what we see, forgetting every-thing that existed before us. Which, I believe, must permit the artist to give his entire personality whether great or small.’
“This is a class about seeing. Observational painting serves as a means to explore one’s individual spirit when encountering nature. Each day we will gather together on Zoom and also venture out to work en plein air in our own vicinities. Painting and drawing will serve as a mechanism for finding a new lens with which to view the natural world. A better understanding of nature’s underlying frameworks will result.
“Through daily discussion of drawing and painting techniques, we will cover basic strategies for seeing relative proportions, identifying values structure and understanding color in context. We will also address the use of limited palettes, strategies for achieving harmonious color and methods of paint application. Each afternoon will include time for reflection on the day’s process, experience and results.”
Seminars
“Contemporary Visual Artists Read the Bible” with Aaron Rosen: “The mere mention of a contemporary artist reading the Bible summons competing stereotypes. On one side stands the artist as clamoring missionary, producing pious kitsch. On the other sits the talented but godless iconoclast, scorning the Bible to the applause of intellectuals. It’s high time to get beyond these stereotypes, rooted in the culture wars of the 1980s, yet sadly back in fashion. There are brilliant artists of faith working with the Bible who have the power to challenge even the most ardent atheists, aesthetically and theologically. And there are artists without a spiritual bone in their bodies who engage scripture in ways that can teach devout viewers a thing or two about faith.
“In this seminar, we will see the Bible with fresh eyes, with the help of cutting-edge art across multiple media, from painting to video to virtual reality. Not only will they look at art, they’ll talk to top-notch artists themselves, who will join us by video from their studios around the world, from Los Angeles to London to Lahore. As one of the world’s foremost experts on religion and art, as well as a practicing curator, Dr. Rosen brings together scholarly and practical insights. And as a Jew married to an Episcopal priest, he has a special interest in how art can help us see difference more clearly and creatively at the same time.”
“How Place Becomes Poetry in Cinema” with Jeffrey Overstreet: “For most filmmakers, place is just a backdrop. But great artists of cinema know that place is as influential and as eloquent as any character. Whether he’s in the heat of Texas or the despair of a divided Berlin, director Wim Wenders is listening to what his location has to say. Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee both read New York City closely, but they see very different cities and zones defined by differing forms of prejudice. We’ll consider how one story, told by both Yasujiro Ozu and Claire Denis in different locations, is transformed by the context in which it is told. And we’ll watch the world opened up by the cinematographers of Terrence Malick as well as the animators Tomm Moore and Martin Rosen. A variety of special guests—filmmakers, film critics, and scholars—will join us for these journeys as we watch how human beings are shaped by the ground beneath their feet. The current guest list [subject to change] includes Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, Sinister), Justin Chang (film critic for the Los Angeles Times), Dr. Yelena Bailey (author of How the Streets Were Made: Housing Segregation and Black Life in America), and Doug Strong (My Angel Larry, River Road).”
“The Art of Contemplative Reading” with Richard Chess: “In this seminar, we’ll explore reading practices (poetry and prose) that may help us cultivate a contemplative mind. As we practice directing our attentions to different aspects of our experiences as readers—noting our physical experience, quieting our inner voices to enable us to hear more clearly the voice of a text, discerning the difference between noting elements of the text itself and commenting on, reacting to, or interpreting the text—we may also discover ways of engaging with texts (mostly literary) that will help us with our practice as artists and/or our spiritual practices. We’ll also do some writing—reflective writing and generative creative writing—to explore writing itself as a contemplative practice.”
Art & Theology 