For Jim Daniels, writing workshops are all about connection.
“Keeping a diary or a journal or notebook of some kind … can help us figure out how we feel about things. The whole process can be therapeutic and provide insight in various ways,” said Daniels, Week Eight’s poet-in-residence at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. “The idea of sharing your work with an audience of readers is often something totally different.”
Throughout the week, Daniels will be leading a workshop — titled “Making the Personal Universal: Impossible, Yet Necessary” — through Special Studies, focused on forming the connection between writer and reader to achieve a new level of poetry.
“Writing for yourself is great and a lot of people do it, but if you’re taking a workshop, the assumption is that you want to make that human connection between reader and writer, to tell other people,” he said.
Daniels, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, is the author of more than 30 collections of poetry and seven short story collections. A frequent faculty member of the Writers’ Center, he currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
Daniels’ workshop aims to help attendees realize that their audience doesn’t always have all the codes to decode meanings to understand their poems. He hopes people in the workshop collaborate with each other in order to start realizing the references that their readers may not understand, and how to avoid these blind spots.
“Poetry, it’s the most compressed form of writing there is, so a lot of times you try and get it down to as few words as possible,” he said. “You kind of squeeze up the meaning. … We will be talking about making that connection and things to be aware of in that process.”
At 3:30 p.m. Sunday in the Hall of Philosophy, Daniels will read from his poetry collection Human Engine at Dawn, as well as some short stories. His wife, writer Kristin Kovacic, is this week’s prose writer-in residence; for the reading, she’ll share some essays from a forthcoming collection. Kovacic wants to focus on essays surrounding her faith, ethnicity and family — as well as her family’s immigration stories.
In Pittsburgh, Daniels and Kovacic live in a deconsecrated Catholic church — “a language church, which means it was Slovak immigrants who built the church in order to continue to speak their own language and to be preached to and forgiven in their own language,” said Kovacic. “It helps me meditate about language and its power and family and place, … and thinking about what it takes to maintain, for example, a house or a church or a family or a relationship, and seeing where that takes me.”
During her workshop this week — titled “Caressing the Details: The Art and Power of Description” — Kovacic hopes to inspire writers to return to the basic principles of observation and description, which may seem to be mundane skills to practice, but have become weakened by the “mediated world” we inhabit.
“As there are more and more claims on our attention, it’s a workshop in practicing the basic skills of observation and description as a way of regaining our authority as observers of our condition, observers of the world around us, or even observers of the past,” she said, “because our own powers of perception are what give us authority.”
Kovacic is an author and essayist, and co-editor of Birth: A Literary Companion. Her essays have won numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, and the Orison Books Prize for Best Spiritual Writing.
In a world full of technology taking up our attention, Kovacic said our power as image-makers and image-perceivers have been weakened, and we’re habituated to outsourcing our own observations.
“Art is image making, and if we lose our confidence and our ability … of perceiving for ourselves and making images for ourselves, … you don’t have a lot to work with when it comes to making metaphor,” she said. “Metaphor is another cornerstone of our art. If you aren’t in the habit of banking images, of really storing up your own perceptions and observations … something will really come of it.”
Kovacic — who believes that the habit of paying attention and the faith in detail are engines of great writing — wants to show workshop attendees what they can accomplish if they slow down and observe.
“There’s so much to observe. (At Chautauqua), you have an exquisite natural environment, art being made all around you, fascinating people,” said Kovacic. “Your own state of mind tends to be open when you’re in Chautauqua … so it’s a great opportunity, I think, to practice that very fundamental skill and discipline of observation and description.”
