Friday, January 24, 2025
6-8PM
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Learning and Engagement Center, Main Building
Featuring:
Emma Eisenberg
Sylvia Jones
Donald Nally
The poet Paul Celan wrote: ‘What times are these when even to speak is a crime for containing so much being spoken’. This quote inspires the title for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s installation What Times Are These? as well as a starting point for an evening of creative writing and reflection around language, politics, and the theme of grace.
Organized in conjunction with What Times are These? on view in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Alter Gallery 276 through March 16, 2025.
Click here to register
May 18, 2024
Margot, Brooklyn
Featuring:
Greer Gibney
Jenny Johnson
Adrienne Raphel
An image of courage that stands out to me lately is students across the country standing up against Israel’s decimation of Palestinians, only to be met with state suppression. These stories of protest, in addition to those of people offering their life as protest, call into question: what does it mean to use your body as a vessel for something greater than you, and how do we use it courageously?
In a still from Rosemary’s Baby, the cover of the magazine, as it was in the film, reads Is God Dead? I think faith, in many cases, is made wrongly synonymous with courage. Here, Rosemary finds herself alone, in danger, and knowing as much only by the language of her own nervous system. Signs. Symbols. Hunches. Our intuition: the voice we sometimes drown out and label unable to care for us, if in opposition to our identity. Courage is to counter: what is my body telling me I can no longer ignore? She’s not in possession of her own body, or others want to use it for their benefit. The baby is a metaphor for that.
When I was born, my sounds tortured my mother. I grew up to breathe silently. Sounds now torture me. It takes courage to listen to the sounds of your body. They’re telling you something. They’re screaming just as loud as the thoughts in your head, the outside voices, the sounds of the house, the walls, the floors. Something big in me is sad to have been silenced.
Courage is to come into this world both in form and spirit. The one who births and the one who is born. Rosemary’s Baby is a kind of hero’s journey. She learns how to listen to her intuitive voice in a world where we often let others do the hard thing and fail to do it ourselves. It’s heroic to piece together your most intimate clues that something is wrong, to sacrifice life as you know it, or even life itself, in honor of your deepest truths.
When called to courage, what part of you responds? How do we make that part the hero? How do we focus on what’s screaming in us, crouched in a corner somewhere in our body, among all the noise?
March 1, 2024
Margot, Brooklyn
Featuring:
Oscar Cuevas
Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
JJ McDonald
Maggie Millner
“Auld Lang Syne”—New Year’s tuning fork—opens with a question. Its familiar call to blush and harmonize and clink our way through some collective yet private vigil, its bittersweet spirit tied to endings as effortlessly as to beginnings. We use moments and songs and days like these to make order of our lives and call the act anniversary. We use anniversary to symbolize an entire ecosystem of memory. What the fuck is an anniversary anyway? Anniversary measures length of time. What constitutes anniversary? Anniversary is an inescapable return. Which is most meaningful to you? Maybe a birthday, a ceremony, a funeral. What do you repeatedly honor? Rituals make meaning. Are we trapped by it? Sometimes. Are we made from it? Many times. Does your body know the song before you remember the words?
December 10, 2023
Margot, Brooklyn
Featuring:
Jess Laser
Hilary Leichter
Annie Liontas
Writing asks us to create architecture from experience. So, what are you trying to build? And what do you do with something you have no place to put? Architecture as symbol. Compiling a pattern. The interior oasis. The meaning we assign space. Body as home as building. Where we keep our intimacy. Our cruelty. Our desired unity. Our memories are housed. Come out of yourself. Make yourself at home.
If I’ve known anything, I’ve known a room. Anything could be my room. But no place is ever the place. The poetics of space. Sick-building syndrome. Building a more just society. Homecoming or housewarming. Take me on a tour of your childhood living room. Self-made cage. The home was my world. The eye is the lamp of the body. The lamp is the house’s eye. Read a house. Read a room. Home is the original metaphor. What’s out your window? What room are you lost to? And can the dreamed place be as potent as the walls around us?
“I am my own hiding place” –Bousquet
October 21, 2023
Margot, Brooklyn
Featuring:
Jonathan Aprea
Brice Peterson
Natalie Shapero
Robert Whitehead
In 2013, I took a creative nonfiction course with Minnie Bruce Pratt. Her refusal to turn away from herself, from discomfort—and in turn, the world and all its broken inhabitations—was one of her most incredible features. She had the most powerful stare, and felt sense of kindness, and hereness, like the feeling of being in a new home where all the doors swing silent.
The leading prompt for the class was to identify and write toward our “burning question.” She let us define that question in silence. It was loud coming from [class]rooms with so much direction and feedback. Her silence offered space for the painful act of crawling out of my protections—to learn how to listen, learn who I was, become a writer who could possess her words. When she passed in July 2023, I felt certain that silence was as, if not more important, than the writing itself. This brought me to write again. What’s in the silence is the burning question, and silence as the theme was an opportunity to learn what other artists make of their own.