Anis Mojgani and Sarah Grace McCandless are starting their Chautauqua Writers’ Center residencies for Week Seven with a faculty reading at 3:30 p.m. Sunday in the Hall of Philosophy.
Mojgani is a writer and visual artist from New Orleans, now based in Portland, Oregon, and a two-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam. He is currently the Poet Laureate of Oregon, and is the author of six poetry books, the libretto for the opera Sanctuaries, and a forthcoming picture book expected in 2025.
For Sunday’s reading, he will be gathering work that he feels will speak to what he is feeling in the moment and appeals to the energy of the audience.
“I’m trying not to have any expectation of what it is that I want this to deliver to them,” he said. “I hope that, ideally, it serves as an invitation to a listener to engage with a practice of listening to their own self and connecting with their own self … that it perhaps just kind of re-sparks something inside of their own thoughts, inside of their own heart.”
Throughout the week, Mojgani will be leading a workshop called “Collaborating with Oneself” through Special Studies. The workshop will center on Mojgani’s relationship with writing and how he approaches the process — making it less about himself as a singular artist, and instead treating it as a found object — in order to tap into something bigger.
“A lot of my writing practice is centered around these two aspects … trying to position myself, my thinking self, my conscious self, to get out of the way of whatever spirit it is that drives the act of writing, and letting that show up and appear, and then stepping towards it to make something together between me and this unseen thing,” said Mojgani.
With the workshop, Mojgani said he aims to offer some clarity to participants about the reasons they write and why they engage in different processes.
“It’s an opportunity for me to offer up to folks who are potentially either trying to make greater sense of their own practice and process, and/or seeking to expand their own practice and process,” he said. “Having spaces where we’re able to share more openly with each other about how we write, how we practice art, how we engage with the creative practice, aids in deflating some of the mystery about it.”
Prose writer-in-residence McCandless will also be leading a workshop — titled “Based on a True Story: Your Personal Life on the Page” — this week focusing on turning real life stories into fictionalized work.
“We all have the capability to create new stories, to create fictionalized stories. So my intention was to create a sort of foundation and a jumping-off point,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be something that happened to you. It could be something that you witnessed … and that might be the beginning of a story that is a fictionalized world.”
McCandless is the author of two novels and a flash memoir. She is a Writing by Writers Mill House Residency recipient and is the producer of Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts Kwame Alexander’s podcast “Why Fathers Cry.”
On Sunday, McCandless will be reading from her book Grosse Pointe Girl, and a work-in-progress memoir.
“They’re very different. One is sort of inspired, but fictionalized … and then one is very true to my real life,” she said. “It feels like that’s a good reflection of what I intend to teach in the workshop, too.”
