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Flying Object, a nonprofit artists and writers collaborative located in Hadley, Massachusetts, attracts hundreds of writers every month through classes, workshops, readings, exhibitions, and a do-it-yourself letterpress studio.
Last Sunday, at the sixth annual Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival, poets Michael and Matthew Dickman joined Dorianne Laux and her husband Joseph Millar to talk about forming a writing community.
On April 1 I had the joy of being in the audience at the New School in New York City for a reading by six poets of the Oulipo, or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (“workshop of potential literature”), a writers group founded in France in 1960 by writer and mathematician Raymond Queneau and scientist François Le Lionnaisnown.
After a brief but torrential thunderstorm in mid-June, eight writers of poetry and prose, myself included, huddled around a picnic table crowded with three-buck beer and leaves of printed-out poems, stories, and essays in the concrete garden of a Brooklyn bar. It had been almost a year since I'd taken a seat at a table with other writers to talk about the stuff, the meat of our writing and the project at hand every time each of us settles in to confront the blank page.
The first time my then-fiancée mentioned Shanghai, China, and our future in the same sentence, we were canoodling in our favorite pizza place in Massachusetts. I, wildly in love, responded to the possibility with nothing more than a slight pause. “Move to China?” I asked. “Sure, why not!”
