Resistance and Interventions: the Writer in Place
We’re going to think about place and community (or the lack of it). We’re
going to write a bit about community, place and the role of the writer: You, young artist, young
writer. Go anywhere you like. But know that a community was there before you—this land was not a
magically unpeopled wilderness to be colonized but a place of history, secrets, struggles, heroes
and issues. What made it a community was not magic, but labor. Maybe if your labor and your work
relates to them, if your aesthetic process is open to that community, your work will not be
superfluous. As an artist or writer anywhere, you’ll need community to survive. Your
community-building not only helps you survive, it helps you produce.
Sesshu Foster has taught in East L.A. for 30 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. Winner of two American Book Awards, his most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and the hybrid World Ball Notebook.
Co-Sponsored by the Office of Dean of Students
*For Scripps Students Only