Eno/Ono: Jumping into Risk through Cross-Genre Explorations w/ Alex Behr

Do we need holes?

What wouldn’t you do?

Use fewer notes

—Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies cards

TAPE PIECE III

Snow Piece

Take a tape of the sound of snow falling.

This should be done in the evening.

Do not listen to the tape.

Cut it and use it as string to tie gifts with.

Make a gift wrapper, if you wish, using the same process with a phonosheet.

1963 autumn

—Yoko Ono, Grapefruit

WHAT: A four-part online generative workshop.

WHERE: The Corporeal Writing Zoom Room.

WHEN: Saturdays, October 2nd, 16th, 23rd & 30th—@1-3PT Note: No meeting October 9th.

STRUCTURE: Participants will write during our meetings and in-between, sending in work and explorations to share. We’ll be generating poetry and micro-memoir pieces and interacting with music, prompts from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards and Yoko Ono’s instructional poems, and our own prompts. Those who wish can receive feedback from me after the lab ends.

COST: $225. Limited sliding scale registrations for anyone needing financial assistance are available. Please email Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com for more info.

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We seek musical metaphors to enrich our writing, and we use writing to describe musical enigmas. As a classical pianist, I make up stories to help me evoke a mood around, say, a piece by Debussy, and as a poet and fiction writer, I subconsciously express lyrical/rhythmic/atonal elements. We can’t separate genres because breath, body, and spirit inhabit both. In this two-day workshop, we’ll use as inspiration Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards, written for musicians, and Yoko Ono’s Fluxus/instructional poems, collected in Grapefruit. Let’s have fun.

Brian Eno is a British composer who gained fame through his work with Roxy Music, Bowie, and his ambient solo recordings—I love Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt created 100 cards, collected as Oblique Strategies, to help musicians in the studio break through creative blocks, such as “Gardening not Architecture” and “Ask your Body.” Ono is a peace activist, filmmaker, singer, and author. She was part of the Fluxus movement, which stressed using everyday objects and embracing the element of chance. One critic said, “The persistent goal of most Fluxus artists was to destroy any boundary between art and life.” Grapefruit collects Ono’s instructions, which teeter between playful and dark, such as “Walk all over the city with an empty baby carriage.” During the pandemic, I taught teens sequestered in their homes using Grapefruit prompts and found resonance in Ono’s surrealist solitude and engagement with nature or strangers.

Through exploring Eno’s and Ono’s writing as prompts, writing our own, listening to music, responding to guided visualizations, and viewing our writing as musically enriched exercises, we’ll develop new pathways as we shape written memories, poems, or fiction into whatever we consider art. We’ll go outside, improvise collective writing, and share our own pieces aloud at the end of the workshop.

This workshop will focus on exploration, taking risks in a low-key atmosphere, and giving us all tools for the next time we’re on our own and feeling stuck.

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Alex Behr has an MFA in creative writing from Portland State and has taught intermediate fiction at PSU, fiction through the Portland Book Fest, and fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction workshops at Portland high schools since 2014. She’s the author of Planet Grim: Stories (7.13 Books), and her interviews, essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in Salon, Tin House, The Rumpus, Vol 1 Brooklyn, Propeller, Nailed, Gravity of the Thing, Lumina, Manifest-Station, Cleaver, and elsewhere. She’s written children’s books, ghost-written YA books, and has copyedited magazines, books, and websites. She’s performed excerpts from her dire teen journals in the comedy show Mortified and has toured and recorded with bands in San Francisco and in Portland. She’s currently working on a poetry collection.

www.alexbehr.com