May 11-13, 2007
Ferron’s songs are autobiographical in the purest sense: she writes about things that really happened, but her songs are rendered with such emotional and artistic perfection that they become mirrors of the soul. 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.
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 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 and our songs. Poets and other creative writers are welcome; non-singers can experience their poems and prose with various kinds of pulse, rhythm, and music. Sharing our work together allows us to heal and be healed.
says writing is a revolutionary act. We are numbed by many things, have to endure double speak, get frustrated trying to make ends meet. In the hectic everydayness, we don't notice that we notice the beautiful. Without touching our innermost feelings, it's hard for our spirits to rise. She says even four lines of poetry per day can give
the courage and the humor we long for and direly need. Ferron has done this workshop before and people have loved it, so we’re delighted by her return. Limited to 16 people, so sign up soon.
Ferron has been writing lyrics since childhood, and she left home at 15 to develop the music growing inside her. As she performed, she continually put her heart on the line, and, by the time Rolling Stone gave Shadows on a Dime a 4-star rating, she’d 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 that “someday, they will call Dylan the Ferron of the ’60s.” She’s remained something less than a household name but is something more than a legend. With ten CDs to her credit, Ferron combines an exploration of life’s essential matters with the tenderness of unbounded love.
“Writing is like spending time with a song, kind of like a date. It’s exciting. I remember years ago learning that underneath anger was sorrow. Why stop halfway when you can go to the bottom of the ocean? You cannot stay there. The way out is through a transcendent sense of belonging. I notice myself saying now that my religion is `yes.’” -- Ferron
“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