Workshop participants were encouraged to bring in a work that felt hopeless. Over three weeks we practiced creative interventions on the hopeless. We translated them into images, wrote them backwards, with the lights off, with our non-dominant hand.
Some of us exposed them to elements. Some baked them in ovens. I put mine under my yoga mat and practiced flowing on it.
I had brought in a dead poem that had originally been prompted by Trump's election. I feared for democracy, and wrote a long whine of an ode out of that fear. It was emotional but dreadful. After the radical experiments, I brought out one image that still had a pulse: the Schoolhouse Rock! Constitution Preamble song.
