In this intimate performance workshop, artist/writer Patty Gone (author of Love Life) and writer/yoga instructor Claire Donato (author of Burial) will guide participants through the fiction of love, drawing inspiration from its oracle, Danielle Steel, the best-selling American novelist of all time, as well as romance’s infinite cultural tendrils. Please arrive ready for conversation and full participatory immersion in the sordid and utopic sides of romance lit.
In these three hours of bringing the romantic page to life, we will:
- Submerge ourselves in both the sordid and utopic sides of romance fiction
- Find our center inside a guided twin flame meditation
- Intimately recite the sensual prose of Danielle Steel
- Write our own happy endings
- Deform old love letters
- Compliment each other’s outfits
- Learn what a ‘basic bitch’ is and what guides her
- Conjure our perfect lovers, deface them, and reconstruct them out of roses
- Emerge anew and in love with life
Patty Gone makes art about popular things. They are the author of Love Life (Mount Analogue, 2019) and The Impersonators (Factory Hollow Press, 2017), and director of the ongoing video serial, Painted Dreams. Their writing, performance, and visual art has been featured in Hyperallergic, Joyland, the Queens Museum, AS220, Dixon Place and many others. Patty writes the video art column Off Brand Video for The Believer. pattygone.com
Claire Donato is the author of Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2013), a not-novel novel, and The Second Body (Poor Claudia, 2016; Tarpaulin Sky Press, reissue forthcoming 2020), a collection of poems. Recent performances have been at the following venues: The Poetry Project, New York; Brown University, Rhode Island; Lévy Gorvy, New York; Poetic Research Bureau, Los Angeles; The Empty Bottle, Chicago; SPACE Gallery, Portland, Maine; and Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts; awards and honors include Hemera Contemplative Fellowship, Pratt Research Seed Grant, Rutgers University Digital Studies Center Fellowship, and a Millay Colony for the Arts Fellowship. In addition to teaching, Claire serves as a mentor for the PEN Prison Writing Project and practices Zen meditation. She teaches in the MFA and BFA Writing Programs at Pratt Institute, and currently lives with one cat and some 50 houseplants in a psychic medium’s building in Brooklyn.
Featured image: Patty Gone, Dating Game, 2019, still from single channel video. Courtesy the artist.