This workshop will engage creative practices for breaking into and breaking out of languages of colonization. 

Artists can build tools to dismantle language patterns formed through imperialism and settler colonialism. In a word laboratory, we'll explore poets who unearth histories of English as a settler language through investigations of keywords, etymologies, and (un)translations. We'll engage with the work of artists who break into and break out language on this level, in the name of unsettlement: M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, JD Pluecker, Solmaz Sharif, Rosmarie Waldrop, and others. In response, this workshop will play with words as a practice of unsettling colonial language, focusing especially on languages used in place names, tactics of occupation, market economics, and ethnologies. 

We'll dissect etymologies, resurrect forgotten language-ancestries, and play with what it means to make queer family from word lineages. We will morph, mutate, and make syntax mess. We'll resurrect extinct meanings and have them play with future sounds. 

While this workshop is focused on English, it will be a generative environment for work in any language. We will approach words as sound and image, and as such this workshop also welcomes practice in creative mediums beyond the written word. 

Goals:

You will create a series of original repositories of English as a settler language. This ‘raw material’ can be creatively intervened and worked with in future projects: glossaries of local place-names, etymological trees, historical archival sources of early colonization, lexicons of terms. 

You will experiment with a series of accessible methods bridging etymological investigation, historical research, audio recording experiments, visual poetry, and constraint-based writing to generate new material for existing or emerging work. 

You will learn from close readings of poetic exemplars using a diverse array of methods to pick apart colonial language: JD Pluecker, Jena Osman, Susan Briante, Natalie Diaz, Solmaz Sharif, Yousif Qasmiyeh, Rosmarie Waldrop and James Thomas Stevens. 

Materials:

It will be helpful to have a device that can record audio while moving around (such as a phone), unlined paper, writing implements, and whatever other art materials you wish to use.

I am a white, cisgendered queer woman from an ancestry of English and Dutch colonial settlers on Wampanoag and Narragansett territory in the early 17th century, and Irish immigrants to the US in the 19th century. I grew up as the only white girl in my class in a Spanish-bilingual elementary school in Cambridge, MA, where I became a fluent Spanish speaker. I was involved from a young age with immigrant advocacy in Boston, MA, working on a collaborative oral history project with Latinx immigrants in Cambridge, and attending public demonstrations and city council meetings in advocating for resources for the Spanish-bilingual community I lived and studied within. I grew up within Quaker communities, and Quaker practices and trainings in centering social justice work with the support of a seeking community have been an important part of my life. 

As a teenager, I moved to England, where I studied for a BA in English and History at Oxford University. Following an MA in History at Harvard University, I began teaching in experiential education. As an instructor with the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School for 8 years, I have been a leader in the school’s increased focus on Diversity and Inclusion, including instituting staff trainings, critically reflecting on educational structure at an administrative level, and developing place-based curricula that centers Black and Indigenous histories of the school's course area in Maine. 

I see experiential education as having the potential to respond to cultures of separation present in traditional academic institutions that are rooted in colonial knowledge, by instead connecting students to body and place. My concern with the political and social implications of human-powered journeys on settled lands led me towards research into educational programs at the US/ Mexico border. I spent a year and a half living in El Paso, TX, where I worked as a volunteer at Annunciation House migrant shelters, and as an advocate visitor with an abolitionist organization at immigration detention centers. These experiences have shaped my understanding of the US settler-state and ongoing colonization. This work was supported through a fundraising campaign I led that allowed for the redistribution of almost $10,000 towards supporting the work of diverse women and LGBTQ+ artist activists in El Paso and Juárez. In the past three years, I have centered my financial life around considerations of equity and reparations. 

I began teaching US history at El Paso Community College, where I frame historical study through simple questions that are inherently connected to daily lived experiences: Whose land are we on? Why do we eat the food that we eat? Why do we speak the language(s) we speak? I have engaged with a Master Teacher program and professional development trainings at El Paso Community College on teaching diverse, predominantly first-generation adult students. Alongside this teaching, I have led independent courses in Place-based US History, working with adult learners largely from settler ancestries who are grappling with questions of confronting colonial legacies and white supremacy in their lives today. 

My creative work as a writer has been recently anchored in the community surrounding the Bilingual MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso. I am provoked and inspired by the work of Susan Briante and JD Pluecker, who I see as directly confronting immigrant and settler ancestries in critiquing the trope of 'giving voice' and instead taking documentary poetics as a means of facing the violence of a colonial legacy. I have studied literary translation with Rosa Alcalá, centering the socio-political implications of translation and its limits. My current project on Carceral Geography in El Paso,TX is funded by the Mellon Humanities Collaborative, and includes leading a team of undergraduate students in El Paso in creating a series of sound walks in carceral spaces in El Paso, TX. My teaching and writing centers on making present disappeared colonial histories within landscapes and embodied experiences.