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Meet the Teaching Artist: Disfiguring Autobiography with Ellen Boyette
by Writing Workshops Staff
2 weeks ago
Hi there! I am a poet and essayist and person who looks at most everything with derangement and wonder. I have studied excessively, written obsessively, and worked many a job I did not enjoy. Now, I am prioritizing generating an artistic practice that is at both remarkably simple and yet impossible to uphold-- mostly to work on my experimental prose manuscript on the nature of privacy in the 21st century. So, in a sense, teaching this course is very selfish. Thank you for indulging me!
What made you want to teach this specific class? Is it something you are focusing on in your own writing practice? Have you noticed a need to focus on this element of craft?
Full disclosure, I took a version of this class during my PhD, taught by one of my favorite writers on the planet, Maggie Zurawski. As someone who is deeply invested in creating highly specific yet widely accessible curriculum, I actually had my own take on this course planned quite a while ago, along with a cornucopia of other niche courses that will likely never see the light of day. This course in particular is something that permeates my own writing (and my philosophy of writing) in every way. I have the conviction to withhold, but the absolute compulsion to confess. I think this tension is something all writers reckon with, especially in a literary era where performance of identity is very much "in". I don't think there's a wrong way to exist in your own work, and this course is really an exercise in freeing up space in our minds about what writing "ought" to do.
Give us a breakdown of how the course is going to go. What can the students expect? What is your favorite part about this class you've dreamed up?
It will be an incredibly simple structure so that we can focus both on the materials and our own generative process. Each week, students will read a short piece before class, and ideally come in with thoughts on it. I love when students are enamored, infuriated, perplexed-- anything that gets the conversation going. It won't necessarily be a matter of figuring the piece out, but rather, interrogating its autobiographical stance. Then, we will reframe the conversation in terms of how we as individuals might channel this approach. I really believe that we have to be thieves in order to develop our own sensibilities. We will practice different levels of confession as well as examine the craft-based techniques that facilitate those levels, feel kinship or discomfort, and determine what best suits our creative endeavors.
What was your first literary crush?
My first literary crush was not an author but an object, probably age three or four-- the bowl of mush in Goodnight Moon. I identified with the mush. I was the mush. I have an essay in the works about Goodnight Moon as a solipsistic deathscape. It purports to be simple. It is driven by motif. It is nuanced in its haunting. It says goodnight to things we ought not say goodnight too unless we were at the very end of ourselves or the world. And it doesn't take itself too seriously, though it deals subtextually and imagistically with the most serious stuff on the planet.
What are you currently reading?
I am currently reading three things, though I try not to do that. I am reading Dysphoria Mundi by Paul B Preciado, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls by W. Vandereycken, and my friend Peter Myers' poetry chapbook Brade Lands, of which I saw many early drafts. They all are fascinating and so so different. Next up will be Abby Ryder-Huth's translation of The Glass Clouding, which just came out this month.
How do you choose what you're working on? When do you know it is the next thing you want to write all the way to THE END?
Truly, I don't choose with poems. Everything happens impulsively and very fast. I don't buy into the muse, but I also do feel that poems move through me, I listen to them as they come, and ask what they want to be. With nonfiction, I have to be more intentional and disciplined, and therefore devote myself only to that which is both vast and deeply personal. I generate stamina there by doing research in weird places that may not count academically as research (we must re-asses how we define research, in my humble opinion).
Where do you find inspiration?
Anything that can't be articulated, what Wittgenstein calls the mystical, is my inspiration. Art that defies explanation. Emotion, pain, dreams, evocation, scent. I am not inclined towards beauty, don't care for sunsets but I am trying to re-sensitize myself. I like ugliness because it's where we so desperately want to look but won't. I'll look.
What is the best piece of writing wisdom you've received that you can pass along to our readers? How did it impact your work? Why has this advice stuck with you?
Carry the image beyond where you think you can, into infinity. You will never be precise enough, and when you get close, that's when it gets weird. And weird is good.
What is your favorite book to recommend on the craft of writing? Why this book?
I mostly don't recommend craft books because I hate anything prescriptive. The best way to develop your craft is to read widely, imitate, and commit the language of others to memory. However, to stop skirting around the question, CA Conrad's Somatic Rituals are shocking, intimate, and pry open how we think of the rituals that surround artistic practice.
Bonus question: What’s your teaching vibe?
If you look me up on Rate My Professor, the kids are saying they learned something. I have pretty de-standardized pedagogical beliefs. I think the classroom should be a laboratory where failure and unknowing are not only inevitable but good and necessary. Also, quantification, proficiency, and efficiency are anathema-- I feel we are too much seeing ourselves as data these days. I also believe that we have to allow the world into the classroom-- theory in a bubble is the worst thing we can do in terms of seeing education as a way to cultivate curiosity, discernment, and agency. I don't know, I'm fun, I'm enthusiastic, I hear myself too much these days and I want my students to feel not only safe to speak up but inspired to.
Learn more about working with Ellen Boyette:
Here is Ellen's upcoming seminar, Disfiguring Autobiography: Writing Into, Around, and Out of Yourself. You can sign up now to avoid the waitlist!
Instructor Ellen Boyette is a PhD student in English and Creative Writing with a concentration in Film Studies at the University of Georgia. Her specialization is Occult Poetics, specifically female poets of the modern and contemporary era. She received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received the Alberta Kelly Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Her work appears in poets.org, Poetry Daily, The Columbia Review, Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of two chapbooks, NITROUS OR MY VELVET KNIFE (2024) and CUFFING SEASON (2023).
