Misanthropy, Spite, and Bile: DAC Delves Into the World of the Written Word

Since moving to Brooklyn to intern at DAC, I’ve conversed with many of the local creative types. Whether waiting for the train or over the orange glow of a cigarette, strangers (more accurately, “pre-acquaintances”) on the streets of Kings County all seem to break the proverbial ice with the same question ---“So, are you an artist?"--- to which I unflinchingly reply, “I’m a writer.”

It’s a key example of the “Same-But-Different” phenomenon. Writers make art, express creativity and offer our perspective on the world but our process, our minds, our voice sounds much different than the more visual brood. However ironically, a theme that bridges the gap between word people and image people is misanthropy---it runs deep in all creative veins.

This summer, DAC caters to the literary crowd, writers specifically, with Misanthropy, Spite, and Bile: A Creative Writing Workshop on Thomas Bernhard. This workshop will focus onvoice, using Bernhard’s novels as a gateway to discussion and analysis of the nature and craft of voice in writing.

Led by John Holiday, a published fiction writer and instructor at Rutgers, the workshop emphasizes creation rather than critique. Every other week the group will discuss one of Bernhard’s (short) novels as a way to examine the author’s distinct and infectious voice and develop your own in its shadow. Writers will respond to prompts inspired by the novel and misanthropic theme to explore the sound of their voice in the context of Bernhard’s prose. In the weeks after discussing the novel, the group will workshop each member’s 1-3 page creative response to the text. These pieces can be prose, poetry, a new middle group yet to be categorized, collaborative, individual, cumulative or isolated---make it creative, make it yours.

The workshop requires three novels, Woodcutters, Concrete, and Correction, all by Thomas Bernhard, and an enrollment fee of $280 ($250 for DAC members).

If you miss the group workshop experience (I do!) and have Tuesday evenings open this summer, don’t hesitate to join the misanthropes. We’re not always so melancholy! But when we are, it makes for beautiful writing.

To enroll or for more info, check out http://www.dumboartscenter.org/Education.html

Misanthropy, Spite, and Bile: A Creative Writing Workshop on Thomas Bernhard with John Holiday

Class dates: Tuesdays, 6:30-8:30 July 12, July 19, July 26, August 2, August 9 & August 16 6:30-8:30 PM

$280 per person | $250 for DAC members

"For there's nothing more terrible than to see a person so magnificent that his magnificence destroys us and we must observe this process and put up with it and finally and ultimately also accept it, whereas we actually don't believe such a process is happening, far from it, until it becomes an irrefutable fact, I thought, when it's too late."

—Thomas Bernhard, The Loser 83