Emily Marie Passos Duffy is our Fall 2023 Tiny Spoon Resident! You can sign-up for her workshop here. We interviewed Emily about her creative visions, inspirations, and writing tips!
Her LIVE, donation-based workshop, Rage and the Radial Narrative, will be held on October 21st & 22nd from 10 AM-12 PM MST / 5-7 PM WET.
An Interview with Emily:
- What inspired your workshop?
I’ve been curious about anger as an animating force. Equally destructive and generative. There is a lot to be angry about; the uncaring powers that be, the violence of bureaucracy, the tedium of adult life. I’ve been wondering about rage as a catalyst for formal choices and narrative shapes. What is possible beyond a manifesto, polemic, or string of expletives? How can rage construct complex forms in writing that envelop and transform?
- Are there any works we’ll be exploring in workshop? Why do you want to highlight them?
The primary work we’ll be exploring in this workshop is Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison. This book has become something of a Bible to me in respect to forms. As a poet who is moving towards longer form prose projects, I’m interested in scale and how we can map our writing into these different shapes, and/ or write from inside of them, making these shapes more or less explicit to the reader.
- Can you tease what workshop attendees might expect?
Workshop attendees can expect to rage, write, converse, move, co-create a playlist, and leave with a piece to carry forward. We will explore the contours of rage and writing through reading together, engaging in prompts , and utilizing different modes for creating narratives within a diverse array of forms.
- Do you have a workshop / pedagogical philosophy you’ll be embracing?
I tend to embrace expressivist, feminist, and process oriented pedagogies. Emergence, excess, and embracing what can be considered “too-much” are pieces of praxis that can support the workshop space as a continuum of discovery, expression, and reciprocity.
- What is your favorite part about workshops?
I love workshops because they have the potential to become think tanks and sites of collective brilliance. There is always an element of surprise and a pivot towards an unexpected direction. Workshops are places where our vulnerabilities and solitudes can coalesce, and we can receive support and insight around blocks we’re facing in our projects or process.
- Do you remember an influential moment in workshop that has stuck with you?
Yes! So, in the summer writing program at Naropa University in, I think it was 2018? In a workshop with Lisa Robertson we were led through a pair exercise. The prompt was to tell your partner about a poem you haven’t been able to write. And then we wrote those pieces for each other as a kind of offering. That exercise felt so pivotal. It was a way of sharing a burden, and it demonstrated the power of thinking and feeling in community. This opened up so much for me, clearing the way for a lot of what became my first book!
Emily Marie Passos Duffy is a poet, performing artist, and author of Hemorrhaging Want & Water (Perennial Press 2023). She has given writing workshops with collective.aporia and Colorado Entertainers Coalition. She was a finalist for the Noemi Press 2020 Book Award and a finalist of the 2020 Inverted Syntax Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She was named a 2020 Disquiet International Luso-American fellow. She received her MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in 2018. She is a PhD candidate in Translation Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon.
