Instant Book/Poem Workshop

I saw a presentation at AWP last year in which the presenter discussed a workshop activity that I’m somewhat basing this on. The presenter’s activity wasn’t quite like this, but it involved using many steps, writing, drawing, and folding the 8-page book. The photographs here show a book written/drawn by Kelly McQuain.

When trying this out with friends, I introduced the idea that the writing would involve writing and drawing and involve writing about place.

Before the first drawing step, we discussed “outside/inside” places we remembered from childhood

The writing/drawing process went roughly like this:

1. Draw an outside/inside place (using half the paper).
(Using nice paper is fun; and providing colored pencils, markers, etc. is good, too)
2. Draw things in boxes (using other half of paper).
3. On a different piece of paper, write. Consider these quotations from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space:

“The tick tock of our watches is so mechanically jerky that we no longer have ears subtle enough to hear the passage of time.”

“From being imagined, calm becomes an emergence of being.”

4. Fold the paper with drawing into an eight-page book.
Here are the best/easiest directions I have found for this folding process–
http://onesheetworkshop.blogspot.com/p/one-sheet-workshop-template.html

5. Going back to the drawing, write a poem (thinking about as story is okay too) about how we inhabit and interpret space. Use the drawing, writing, and quotation.