Picture a square piece of yellow paper. Picture a square piece of blue paper. Now picture them next to each other side by side. As the visual artist Joseph Albers says in Interaction of Color, perceived simultaneously, they are visualized as combined and merged into one new color. In this workshop, we’ll explore how this concept of juxtaposition from the visual arts might be applied to revision in a written work-in-progress. How might exercises borrowed from the visual arts be applied to a written work? What happens when the order of two sentences, or of two paragraphs, is flipped? Does meaning change? Does tone change?
For this workshop, bring a short excerpt from a work-in-progress or journal entry, of no more than five pages, and we will apply several hand-on exercises from Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color to writing exercises. This workshop is for writers working in any genre.
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Adria Bernardi the author of three novels, a collection of short stories and a collection of literary essays, an oral history, and eight translations from Italian. She has received the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Raiziss/DePalchi Translation Award, and the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Award. Her most recent book, The Ambiguity of the Hypotheses: four landmarks within Gadda’s Pasticciaccio, is published by Bordighera Press. Her hybrid novel, Obbligato: The Life and Times of Mrs. Charlotte Home, is forthcoming in spring 2028 from Unbound Edition Press.
