workshops + teaching
I have been teaching and facilitating writing and book-making workshops in various settings up and down the West Coast since 2009. My approach values collaboration, process oriented experimentation,
and interdisciplinarity, often pulling from three or more sources or disciplines,
or working with another artist and/or thinker as co-teacher.
I am a full proponent of saying "yes, and..." to guide oneself down the path of making publications.
student work from Book in an Edition, Mills College, 2014
material
My workshops start with the materials of creating works of publication in the broadest sense, from paper, ink, adhesive, and thread, to sentences, words, letters, dots, white spaces, and...IDEAS. Students will get their hands touching THINGS and their brains digging into the essential pieces that construct language, and thus, books!
setting type by hand is laborious, but it has infinite things to teach you about the composition of a page
process
Students in my workshops are encouraged to think about their projects holistically right from the start. My book artist inclination is to be obsessed with the perfect container for an idea, thus, working from an attention to materials, I look for ways to get students to recognize each step or aspect of the process of making a book as full of choices one can make that could take them closer to or further away from the meat of what they're trying to say.
student work from workshop at The Evergreen State College, 2011