Portrait Essays: A Writing Workshop
SPEAKER: Peggy Perdue
Portrait Essays: A Writing Workshop
SPEAKER: Peggy Perdue
In this multi-disciplinary, cross-generational writing and art workshop, we’ll pull from several tools and practices–portraiture, poetry, writing, and journalism–to get curious about the people we don’t know, and the people we thought we knew.
Bring a photograph or image of someone you want to know more about. It can be of an individual or an individual in a group but must include the person you want to write about. Something that represents that person or makes you ask questions. It can be a historical figure or a passing fancy or an intimate acquaintance.
Bonus points if it’s a person from a different generation. Extra, extra bonus points if it’s a person you disagree with ideologically.
Over the course of the workshop we will use writing prompts, artistic perspectives, and even journalistic interviewing to practice curiosity, listening, and understanding to dig deeper into who that person is, why they do what they do, where they come from–and in the process, maybe even learn a little bit more about ourselves, and all of us in our flawed and beautiful human lives.
Participants will come out of the workshop with a working document, the tools, and next steps to continue their quest into deeper understanding and listening.
To reserve your spot, please email events@bentoncountymuseums.org
Cost: $40-$60 sliding scale
About the instructor
Peggy Perdue lives in her own world, where she spends as much time possible thinking, imagines everything is waaaayyyy easier than we’re making it, and doesn’t care if people think her ideas are naïve.
She has a degree in English-Journalism and has worked for Chattanooga Times Free Press, Portland Monthly, Willamette Week, and more.
In 2017/18, she was an Atheneum fellow in poetry at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters in Portland, Oregon. Her poem “How to Do Anything Better” was selected for Abandoned Mine‘s inaugural online journal issue and published in its print anthology.
She has performed readings at bookstores alongside poet laureates, as well as at cafes with aspiring writers.
Born and raised in the Midwest, she attended high school and college in the South, and now lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest.
