Shorthand—A Multi-Session Workshop with Paul Druecke

A few compact lines can have the breadth of a novel. Though often decried as the end of literature, today’s trends toward terse messaging, burgeoning palettes of emojis, shrinking attention spans fueled by distracting handheld computers can all be productive points of reference for understanding and capturing the essence of time and place.

During the workshop we will survey inspiring and infamous examples of spare, highly-concentrated writing that achieve maximum effect with minimum material. For example, Jenny Holzer’s prescient aphorism, “Abuse of power comes as no surprise,” has a nuanced tone that both confronts and commiserates with the reader. We will look to Holzer, along with Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Mary Oliver, Ron Padgett, Aram Saroyan, Audre Lorde, and Morgan Parker as we mine contemporary media landscapes and/or our phones for inspiration. Through sketches, experiments in brevity, and tweet-length searching, we will explore what can be left out as we create micro-masterpieces for the times.

Paul Druecke has published two books with Green Gallery Press, Life and Death on the Bluffs (2014) and The Last Days of John Budgen Jr. (2010). He wrote about America Pastime, a Sisyphean tribute to patterns of convenience and waste, as part of Woodland Pattern’s 2020 series Prompts Against Anxiety. Druecke is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersection of poetry, identity, and public history. His work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and anthologized in the Blackwell Companion to Public Art. His first solo museum exhibition, A Social Event Archive, was hosted by the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2017. His ongoing project Milwaukee Kitchen has been described as “the only surrealist cooking program in the world.”