Tag workshop

nonlinearity & upcoming virtual craft class

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Life after Ruin & Want has been nonlinear.

After publishing a fragmented memoir rooted in trauma, I spiraled into burnout. For a while, I didn’t think I’d write again. I found myself saying: I wrote the book, now to understand the life behind it.

That’s been the work: retracing my steps. Not to tidy the past, but to name and acknowledge what led me there in the first place. What came through intuition, what emerged by accident, what remained unspeakable until I let form and rhythm carry it–all of it, retraced one day and word at a time.

This process (part excavation, part self-return) has shaped my upcoming online class:

Rumination as Route: Crafting Non-Linear Personal Narratives

A 2-hour generative workshop on writing the way your mind actually moves.

This is a space for writers who want to:

  • Break free from rigid storytelling forms
  • Let thought rhythms shape structure
  • Explore fragmentation, return, and intuitive connection

We’ll read short, resonant examples. We’ll talk about what stays with us. And we’ll write—not toward a neat ending, but into the pulse of memory, image, and voice. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You don’t need a clear timeline or a clean story. Just bring your curiosity and a willingness to follow your writing wherever it wants to go.

Date & Time: Sunday June 1, 2025 @3-5pm EST
Where: Online (Zoom)
Cost: $60
Register here: https://thenotebookscollective.com/event/rumination-as-route/

If you’re looking for a space to explore, not explain, come join us.

Hope to see you there!

= José =


* Jack Gilbert, unfortunate cats, & the friday influence

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Married – Jack Gilbert

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

***

For today’s friday influence I present the above poem by Taurus poet Jack Gilbert.

The marvel of this poem is how it has no outright metaphor or simile but rather builds a metaphor out of the details of the life lived, the idea of being ‘married’ made up of peopletangledin the dirt.

To give you an idea of the metaphor-making mind of Jack Gilbert: in a workshop, he spoke once of how workshopping a poem can be like dropping a dead cat on the table.  You can say whatever you want of it, it’s still a dead cat.  You want a live cat.  Damn it.

(the ‘damn it’ is, admittedly, my own)

***

On the road at the moment.  The reading went great.  Mas later.

Happy tangling,

J