"Physical Translating"

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A creative writing workshop

Saturdays, 10 am - 1 pm, July 10, July 17, July 24

The Women's Resource Center, Zarubyan 34

"Physical Translating" is a body-based creative writing workshop for women facilitated by writer Nancy Agabian (see bio below). It will take place in conjunction with the WOW (Women-Oriented Women) Collective's 3rd annual art intervention July 31-August 1, this year on Translation, at the Women's Resource Center in Yerevan. In three Saturday morning three-hour sessions, workshop participants will collaborate to write prose (fiction and/or nonfiction, in English, Armenian, and/or other languages) about physical experiences -- in illness, disconnection, pain, joy, experimentation, athleticism, sexuality, reproduction and otherwise.

To stimulate discussion and prompt writing exercises, we will read short texts (in English and Armenian) by a range of contemporary multicultural women writers (possibly including Margaret Atwood, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Audre Lorde, Staceyann Chin), including Armenian writers (mostly selected from the anthologies Deviation, Matnashoonch and Der Hovanessian's The Other Voice). Creative movement/performance exercises will also be incorporated to inspire writing. The series will culminate in a reading of new work during WOW's weekend art intervention. A special section of the WRCA's journal Feminist will feature work from "Physical Translating."

The workshop is open to all women, regardless of national origin, age, class, physical ability, and sexual orientation. The project will be limited to twelve participants of varied writing experience, beginning writers welcome. Please send a page describing your writing experience and why you are interested in the workshop to nancyagabian@yahoo.com (Այս էլ.փոստի հասցեն պահպանված է spam bots-երից, պետք է Javascript-ին հնարավորություն տալ դիտելու համար) by June 19th. Please also state whether you will be able to attend all three sessions and the reading. Members will be notified of their acceptance by June 26th.

Please contact Nancy with questions and requests for further information at her above email address.

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Nancy Agabian is the author of Princess Freak (Beyond Baroque), a collection of poems and performance texts, and the memoir Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter. She is one of the tri-authors of (An)daratsutian Mej [In the (Un)Space], an experimental book in English, French and Armenian. Her nonfiction and poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Armenia. A Fulbright scholar to Armenia for 2006-07, she is working on a nonfiction novel on personal freedom in post-Soviet Armenia. In New York, where she lives, she teaches writing at Queens College and New York University and has been coordinating Gartal, an Armenian and multicultural reading series since 2002. A community workshop leader since 1994, she previously led a writing workshop for women, sponsored by Utopiana and CEC Artslink, at WRCA in 2007.