Multimodal Workshops

This workshop invites participants to share and learn strategies for one of writing’s ongoing challenges: starting. It will take up the joint problems of first finding the time (and motivation, and conviction) to start writing, and then, once we’ve done so, styling the words on the page so they’ll reach the audiences we care about. This workshop will draw on Sarah Mesle’s experiences as a writer, editor, and professor of writing to give practical advice for writers and teachers. Participants are invited to bring a notebook, a calendar, a laptop if they’d like, and a digital version of an opening paragraph(s)—no more than 250 words— of a piece of writing they’re working on, or that they admire, for our collective discussion.

In this two-day workshop with Eric Von Haynes and Julia Warner, drawing from readings such as “Three Key Elements of Mutual Aid,” participants will interpret a shared space and collaboratively build a layered artwork that embodies a collective agreement and shared purpose. Participants will use patterns, collage, text, and visual marks to create a collaborative wall reflecting Community Care and Collective Power. Each participant will produce a 10×10-inch segment that contributes to a unified grid, collectively forming a wall-scale composition. This workshop emphasizes process as much as outcome, encouraging experimentation, iteration, and collaborative response. Day One focuses on developing and refining designs, while Day Two is dedicated to printing, overprinting, and assembling the final collaborative wall display. Space is limited and registration required. All materials provided. 

For more than 20 years, Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett have been working to translate academic work into media: first as reporters and producers for public radio, and now as independent audio producers. As Sam and Chris visit universities to perform their live audio show, they’re meeting with faculty to help them better communicate their work to the academic community, their administrations, media organizations, and the general public. In this 2-hour, hands-on session they will workshop faculty's media strategies live tailored to their research, area of expertise, and professional goals.

In this workshop with Audra Wolowiec we will create sound scores and visual poems by mining the writing of others. Scores invite us to read and listen in new ways. Scores can be read quietly, imagined, or performed. Score comes from old Norse skor, to make an incision, from the root sker, to cut. Through processes of errant editing and close reading, we will locate undercurrents of sound in the spirit of Maggie Nelson’s “Writing With, From, and For Others” and Trinh T. Min-ha’s concept of “speaking nearby.” Examples of sound scores and visual poems will be introduced through Audra's own work and process, and we will learn how to make a simple folded zine through collage and photocopy techniques. Materials will be provided, no previous knowledge needed. You are welcome to bring a book or writing to work with.

In this workshop, led by Leniqueca Welcome, we will explore collaging as a poet(h)ical visual research practice. Like the poem, the collage breaks open both the normative form and narrative logic of the realist image, instead building an abstract world from fragments rich with multiple meanings and feelings. Collaging is particularly useful in anthropological research, allowing the composer to render the beauty, pain, complexity, and relationality of encountered life without presenting a transparent linear picture of a person that could be simply consumed by audiences. Mimicking Welcome’s ethnographic method, participants will be invited to engage in a short life story listening exercise, after which they will create their own paper collage that reflects their engagement and embraces ambiguity and excess. Space is limited and registration required. All materials provided.

Erasure is a process of removing parts of existing text to form something new. More than word play, erasure is a creative and critical tool for exploring possibility within limits. In this hands-on workshop with Risa Cromer, participants will explore the power of erasure art as it relates to the 2025–26 Taft Center theme: Period.

Join Taft Professor of Public Humanities Chandra Frank to explore what it means to notice "the everyday" during a critical walking methodologies workshop. We will embark on a collective walk to consider how walking can shape our writing and creative research practice. Participants will be invited to experiment with different walking methods followed by journaling prompts. Inspired by Amitava Kumar’s writing and walking practice, we will draw on the correlations between noticing, walking, and writing. 

Experiment with time, perspective, and intertextuality in this beginner-friendly painting workshop with artist Jeshua Schuster! Inspired by Amitava Kumar’s painting practice and selections from The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal (2022) and The Green Book: An Observer’s Notebook (2024), we will learn techniques to record and respond to the world around us through drawing, painting, and writing. We’ll “slow-jam the news,” paint trees, and revel in the quiet art of noticing.

Join Taft Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Assistant Fatemeh Rezaei and Taft Director Stephanie Sadre-Orafai for a journaling and journal-making workshop inspired by Amitava Kumar’s The Yellow Book: A Traveller’s Diary (2023). We will discuss the relationship between marking time and making marks, or how a daily writing and reflection practice can invigorate our creative and scholarly endeavors. Participants will learn to make a concertina journal and collectively generate a list of prompts to use in their new hand-made accordion-style sketchbook/diary. 

In our social media-inundated age, printed zines remain a powerful, tactile, inexpensive, and enduring alternative for sharing images, ideas, drawings and writings. Creating zines gives authors an opportunity to work alone or with others to explore a limitless range of subjects while employing a variety of skills. These small publications can be printed and displayed, traded, shared, or left for others to find. In this workshop with Marc Fischer we'll start by looking at zine models that use the most elemental format - a single flat or folded sheet of paper. Working in groups or solo, we will generate content, design, and print our own zines on a Risograph and share them at the end. Bring your ideas or writings that you’d like to see turned into printed zines.