From: Nadine Rambeau <nrambeau@SFMOMA.org>
To: Andy Couturier <andy@theopening.org>
Andy, Andy, Andy!
I just have to thank you. I woke up at 6am this morning and was so inspired by last night's class I haven't been able to stop writing. I was writing so much this morning, I missed three buses! I never thought I'd be writing about some of this stuff. Thanks again!
Nadine
Andy,
Thank you for this class. I think part of your gift has to do with helping people feel safe enough to open up - - it's a place where authenticity and true creative freedom have room to flourish - and be seen and validated. I remember when I first read your essay in Creative Nonfiction years ago before I met you--I loved it and remembered it... I also remember thinking that I would like to meet the author. Your voice, your experience, your feelings and inner questions were what made that story unique. I am really happy to be working with you and I would really recommend the Writing From the Subconscious courses to anyone seeking to develop trust in the mind's profusion - its inexhaustible well...
Denise Carrigg
Dear Andy,
... The freedom & opening of your way of working are the strong
points of your course, I thought--very different from the many (also
valuable) writing classes I've taken at other places which emphasize
more traditional points about structuring, word choice, etc. Very much
about a sense of freshness & newness & shaking up the ordinary.
For me the best parts of this course were the more playful, chaotic elements--the encouragement to flow & be wild & wacky without focusing on the product. I also valued that very open playing field, seeing what some of the extremes & possibilities are.
The writing exercises were all great. An especially valuable one was when we did big shifts in the order of material in a work. I could use more of those. Your written comments on the pieces I brought in were GREAT! and so kind of you to put so much time into it.
Annelise Kelly
[Letter to the Editor]
Andy Couturier's "Asymmetry Writing and the Mind" (in Kyoto
Journal #47) invites writers and artists to shake up their thinking
and break out of genres or conventions. Though I am no author or painter,
as someone who works in conflict resolution I can also see the value
of overcoming linearity, of leaving some space to move around it, and
of defining a space without circumscribing it. In my often baffling
field we tend to value mere symmetry when the equity we should seek
might involve a far more complex, possibly more generous, relation of
"elements of significantly different volume or size." Thanks
for articulating something so useful to all.
Andre Rostand, Paris, France
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