Workshop Leader: Nate Brown, Johns Hopkins University

Inspired by Geoffrey Sirc’s notion of composition as a “happening,” this interactive workshop invites university writing center staff and faculty to reimagine the work we do as an act of collaborative making. Participants may share the activities from their own writing centers that emphasize textuality, making, and the creation of public-facing documents (like magazines, zines, pamphlets, posters, presentations, lit. mags, graphical works, etc.). During the workshop, we’ll ask participants to collaboratively build a list of activities and events currently taking place in our writing centers and participate in an ideation activity where we’ll imagine new potential generative, creative activities, workshops, and publishing projects that are meant to get students thinking about how writing makes them active agents in the world.

Led by Nate Brown, faculty member in the University Writing Program, Associate Director of JHU’s Writing Center, and longtime literary editor and publisher, the workshop explores how collective, embodied acts of writing and how the production of public-facing publications can foster creativity while circumventing the easy and reductive pull of LLM-generated text.

Please note: If you plan to attend the workshop, please choose either the Friday Only or the Friday + Saturday option when registering for the conference.