Apr 7-9, 2006
Ferron’s songs are autobiographical in the purest sense: she writes about things that have really happened in her life. The words are chiseled from the everyday hard stone of reality. While the outer events unfold as a story, the inner, deeper landscape beckons us to the realm of fate, choice, paradox, and sensuality. The experiences are rendered with such emotional and artistic perfection that her songs become mirrors of the soul.
Art reflects the continual play between illusion and reality. In the limitless world of our experiences, it’s possible to shape our stories through the laws of rhyme and meter. It’s possible to allow words and symbols to emerge into their natural environment — that of metaphor. Everything represents everything. Once this understanding is visceral, telling the story feels joyful and fluid.
Through a range of writing exercises, journaling, speed-writing, and playing with rhyme scheme, we’ll lay down our thoughts. Poets and other creative writers are welcome; non-singers can experience their poems and prose poems with various kinds of pulse, rhythm, and ambient music. No one has ever walked away from one of Ferron’s workshops without a story, a poem, a song, or some kind of writing that is of quality and importance.
“Nobody gets it right the first time, and maybe getting it right is not really what its all about. Writing is about being curious about the veil between what we think, what we say, and what we don’t say. I remember years ago learning that underneath anger was sorrow. Why stop halfway when you go to the bottom of the ocean? I notice myself saying now that my religion is `yes.’” Limited to 16 people.
Ferron has been writing lyrics since childhood. She left home at 15 to work and to develop the music that was growing inside her. As she performed, she continually put her heart on the line. By the time Rolling Stone had given Shadows on a Dime a 4-star rating, she had already gained a nearly fanatical following. Ferron’s deeply introspective, sometimes oblique lyrics and the hushed splintered grain of her voice invited comparisons with Bob Dylan. The Boston Globe claimed, “Someday, they will call Dylan the Ferron of the ’60s.” With 10 CDs to her credit, Ferron sings her poems in a style that combines an exploration of life’s essential matters with the tenderness of unbounded love. She toured with the Indigo Girls on and off from 1990 to 1996, yet she’s remained something less than a household name, but more than a legend.
“Ferron’s workshop was the most outstanding of the six I’ve attended at Rowe, and that’s saying something! Deftly, firmly, she led me on a journey that drew out a song expressing something I’ve needed to say for decades, and I witnessed others having similar life-changing, artistic experiences. Her workshop is about writing in all its forms, not just song writing, for she taught us to court the Muse through valuing our own experience and tapping our personal imagery.”
—Sarah Buchholz