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The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction
A common definition of ekphrasis is descriptive writing influenced by the visual arts. Beyond the written word, however, responding to art can engender self-reflection, creativity, and help writers to build characters, plot, and setting. This book unites the history and tradition of ekphrasis, its conventions, the writing process, and multi-genre writing prompts. In addition to subjects such as early art engagement, psychology, and the eye-brain-perception relationship, this book discusses artists' creative processes, tools, and techniques, and offers instruction on how to read art by way of deep-looking.
240 pages, Paperback
Published June 19, 2020
9 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
Janée J. Baugher
3 books5 followersJanée J. Baugher is the author The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020)—the only guidebook of its kind, and two ekphrastic poetry collections, Coördinates of Yes (Ahadada Books, 2010) and The Body’s Physics (Tebot Bach, 2013), her writing has been published in over 100 journals such as Tin House, The Southern Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Nano Fiction, and The Writer’s Chronicle, and she’s read at the Library of Congress. She holds degrees from Boston University and Eastern Washington University, has attended Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and has been awarded residencies at Soaring Gardens (PA), Island Institute of Sitka (AK), Silver Creek Residency (ID), Marble House Project (VT), Dorland Mountain Arts Colony (CA), North Cascades Institute (WA), and Write On, Door County (WI). She regularly collaborates with choreographers, dancers, composers, and visual artists, and her work has been adapted for the stage and set to music at venues such as University of Cincinnati–Conservatory of Music, Contemporary Dance Theatre in Ohio, Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, Dance Now! Ensemble in Florida, The Salon at Justice Snow’s in Colorado, Otterbein University, and University of North Carolina-Pembroke. Baugher teaches Creative Writing in Seattle is currently a poetry reader for the St. Louis literary journal Boulevard. She teaches creative writing in Seattle.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 6, 2021
Writers of poetry or prose: this is a really wonderful resource, full of ideas, "writing invitations"and art. Useful as a text for a course or on your own. I have to admit to knowing little about ekphrastic writing until I picked up this resource. It simply means letting your writing be influenced by art of all forms. Mind-opening!
June 29, 2021
It's hard for me to decide on a star rating. There were many things I loved about this book. And then there were a few things I disliked. I think I can still recommend it – with caveats – so I will settle on 4 stars.
First, the introduction was clear – but too broad. The author claims this book is for both “instructors who are comfortable giving their students artistic freedom” as well as “independent writers.” Because it tried to accomplish two things, I was not always sure what was for me and what wasn't. I tried to come to it with an open mind. I thrilled to her “invitation to marvel in the deep wonderment of the visual arts and to see how that marveling might ignite your writing.” And it did.
But I was already a lover of art and was in the middle of trying my own hand at painting. For me, there were several sections of the book that felt too heavy and bogged down in so many suggestions. I felt it needed a bit of editing for conciseness. And there were too many examples of free writes. After a while, I just skipped them. For the beginner or someone more left-brained, I think this book might scare them off before they get to the “good stuff.”
Teachers – I assume of writing, though it was never clear if the author expected art classes to use all the same exercises – will want to pick and choose from the overabundance of suggestions and exercises and curate them to their own class.
I love – love – loved that the author was able to print full-color reproductions of many artworks! And then showcase one or another kind of ekphrasis of each artwork. But some of the ekphrases were spread many pages apart from the artwork – on purpose. I never fully understood why, especially if this is more to teachers.
I enjoyed the creativity I forced on myself as I set a goal to complete an ekphrasis for every writing suggestion. By the middle of the book, however, I was struggling to say anything I hadn't already. And many exercises asked me to choose my own artwork. This was too vague and activated my decision overwhelm. In our era of Google searches, “any artwork that catches your eye” doesn't help.
I think what bothered me the most was how unpleasing it was to the eye. I know that such a dense book with full-color images must have cost a pretty penny to produce. But that's why I wish it had been edited a bit more. If there had been room for more bullets, more margin space, bigger font for block quotes, and more lists, I believe it would have been a more enjoyable experience. It started out fine with bolding the introductory terms and including a few lists. But as the chapters wore on, I felt the formatting was forgotten, especially the last chapter. So many nuggets were lost in the sea of text. There was just too much crammed into this book.
However, having said all that, the author's passion for art and writing about art is infectious. She asks many probing questions that require pondering. I can still recommend it as a resource for teaching creative thinking, and I will probably be coming back to this again.
Favorite quotes:
“What is more artistically pure than viewing art as a nexus to your own art-making? If, as John Ruskin asserted in Modern Painters, imagination is the highest intellectual power of humankind, then writers must ask themselves: Am I honoring the full capacity of my mind? … Ekphrastic writing is a way of charging the imagination.” (p. 21)
“'The activity of art is based on the fact that a man … is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.'” (quoting Leo Tolstoy in What is Art, p. 85)
“It is fascinating to learn that the struggles that some writers have feeling free to create are shared with artists of other disciplines … Working quickly – a technique used by both writers and artists – is one method by which you fool the brain into forgoing its tendency to criticize.” (p. 89)
“Is the spirit of making ekphrases similar to when we were children with picture books and the images invited speculation, urging us to await with bated breath what would happen next? … Ultimately, though, there is no recipe for responding creatively to visual imagery. What pleases you about the artwork is my suggestion for beginning your engagement. Creative musings on art are never conclusive.” (p. 199) I learned the same thing in my art course on how to choose a reference photo. Choosing a subject to paint eventually boils down to what it is you like about the photo and focus on that, while letting other details fade. The similarity between pursuits is fascinating.
“Is description about to enjoy a new renaissance? … Will the mode of ekphrasis be revered as a skill inextricably connected to technology? We shall see.” (p. 215)
First, the introduction was clear – but too broad. The author claims this book is for both “instructors who are comfortable giving their students artistic freedom” as well as “independent writers.” Because it tried to accomplish two things, I was not always sure what was for me and what wasn't. I tried to come to it with an open mind. I thrilled to her “invitation to marvel in the deep wonderment of the visual arts and to see how that marveling might ignite your writing.” And it did.
But I was already a lover of art and was in the middle of trying my own hand at painting. For me, there were several sections of the book that felt too heavy and bogged down in so many suggestions. I felt it needed a bit of editing for conciseness. And there were too many examples of free writes. After a while, I just skipped them. For the beginner or someone more left-brained, I think this book might scare them off before they get to the “good stuff.”
Teachers – I assume of writing, though it was never clear if the author expected art classes to use all the same exercises – will want to pick and choose from the overabundance of suggestions and exercises and curate them to their own class.
I love – love – loved that the author was able to print full-color reproductions of many artworks! And then showcase one or another kind of ekphrasis of each artwork. But some of the ekphrases were spread many pages apart from the artwork – on purpose. I never fully understood why, especially if this is more to teachers.
I enjoyed the creativity I forced on myself as I set a goal to complete an ekphrasis for every writing suggestion. By the middle of the book, however, I was struggling to say anything I hadn't already. And many exercises asked me to choose my own artwork. This was too vague and activated my decision overwhelm. In our era of Google searches, “any artwork that catches your eye” doesn't help.
I think what bothered me the most was how unpleasing it was to the eye. I know that such a dense book with full-color images must have cost a pretty penny to produce. But that's why I wish it had been edited a bit more. If there had been room for more bullets, more margin space, bigger font for block quotes, and more lists, I believe it would have been a more enjoyable experience. It started out fine with bolding the introductory terms and including a few lists. But as the chapters wore on, I felt the formatting was forgotten, especially the last chapter. So many nuggets were lost in the sea of text. There was just too much crammed into this book.
However, having said all that, the author's passion for art and writing about art is infectious. She asks many probing questions that require pondering. I can still recommend it as a resource for teaching creative thinking, and I will probably be coming back to this again.
Favorite quotes:
“What is more artistically pure than viewing art as a nexus to your own art-making? If, as John Ruskin asserted in Modern Painters, imagination is the highest intellectual power of humankind, then writers must ask themselves: Am I honoring the full capacity of my mind? … Ekphrastic writing is a way of charging the imagination.” (p. 21)
“'The activity of art is based on the fact that a man … is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.'” (quoting Leo Tolstoy in What is Art, p. 85)
“It is fascinating to learn that the struggles that some writers have feeling free to create are shared with artists of other disciplines … Working quickly – a technique used by both writers and artists – is one method by which you fool the brain into forgoing its tendency to criticize.” (p. 89)
“Is the spirit of making ekphrases similar to when we were children with picture books and the images invited speculation, urging us to await with bated breath what would happen next? … Ultimately, though, there is no recipe for responding creatively to visual imagery. What pleases you about the artwork is my suggestion for beginning your engagement. Creative musings on art are never conclusive.” (p. 199) I learned the same thing in my art course on how to choose a reference photo. Choosing a subject to paint eventually boils down to what it is you like about the photo and focus on that, while letting other details fade. The similarity between pursuits is fascinating.
“Is description about to enjoy a new renaissance? … Will the mode of ekphrasis be revered as a skill inextricably connected to technology? We shall see.” (p. 215)
September 6, 2021
The Ekphrastic Writer – Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction by Janée J. Baugher is a splendid pedagogical book! When I was teaching semiotics (before my retirement!) it would have been the ideal textbook. Unfortunately, it did not exist at that time. Present day teachers are lucky to have it.
As a semiotician (from Greimas’s school), I taught my students to analyze and write texts of all kinds. It was easy to find narratives (including mythical and religious ones – such as the gospels), and/or philosophical or theological discourses (including most sophisticated ones – such as Paul’s letters) as models that I could ask my students to emulate by following either the narrative or discursive logic of these models. But I constantly struggled (failed!) to teach my students how to appreciate – let alone duplicate – figurative, poetic discourses and/or the figurative dimensions of other kinds of texts.
From Greimas, I had learned that these figurative dimensions are generated by the inter-textual features of discourses/texts: any given discourse/text involves ekphrastic dimensions which are generated through interactions with figures in art of all kinds, and these ekphrastic dimensions become primary in figurative discourses/texts. I could theoretically point my students in the direction of those inter-texts that were explicitly mentioned in a given text. But I was missing good examples and exercises that I could help my students fully appreciate the visions of the text they were reading by recognizing the figures it constructed by alluding to artistic figures of one kind or another. And consequently, I could not teach my students to elaborate their own figurative texts – although some surprised me by doing it.
Janée Baugher provides such examples and exercises, page after page. Of course, Baugher does not tell her readers what they should think about a poem, a painting, a sculpture, a building. She constantly asks her readers what “topics and conventions” they appreciate in the poem – including beauty, absence, religion, history, war, death, nature, landscape, science, humans – or the visual arts – including perception, illusion, perception and empathy in arts found from the artist’s studio to the museums… all this followed by “writing invitations.” Why? Because (in Greimas’s terminology) the figurative dimension of a discourse necessarily is an invitation to prolong it into another figurative “discourse” – whether it is in the form of a poem, of an artistic creation, or a performance. And in my teaching – aimed at asking students to emulate the narrative or discursive logic of the texts under study – I constantly failed to allow my students to respond to the creative invitation of the figurative dimensions of the texts under study. This is what Janée Baugher does in a most fascinating way by amplifying the creative invitation of a multitude of very diverse examples that she offers us in The Ekphrastic Writer – Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction.
Daniel Patte, Professor Emeritus, Vanderbilt University. Author of The Religious Dimensions of Biblical Texts: Greimas's Structural Semiotics and Biblical Exegesis and translator of A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary.
As a semiotician (from Greimas’s school), I taught my students to analyze and write texts of all kinds. It was easy to find narratives (including mythical and religious ones – such as the gospels), and/or philosophical or theological discourses (including most sophisticated ones – such as Paul’s letters) as models that I could ask my students to emulate by following either the narrative or discursive logic of these models. But I constantly struggled (failed!) to teach my students how to appreciate – let alone duplicate – figurative, poetic discourses and/or the figurative dimensions of other kinds of texts.
From Greimas, I had learned that these figurative dimensions are generated by the inter-textual features of discourses/texts: any given discourse/text involves ekphrastic dimensions which are generated through interactions with figures in art of all kinds, and these ekphrastic dimensions become primary in figurative discourses/texts. I could theoretically point my students in the direction of those inter-texts that were explicitly mentioned in a given text. But I was missing good examples and exercises that I could help my students fully appreciate the visions of the text they were reading by recognizing the figures it constructed by alluding to artistic figures of one kind or another. And consequently, I could not teach my students to elaborate their own figurative texts – although some surprised me by doing it.
Janée Baugher provides such examples and exercises, page after page. Of course, Baugher does not tell her readers what they should think about a poem, a painting, a sculpture, a building. She constantly asks her readers what “topics and conventions” they appreciate in the poem – including beauty, absence, religion, history, war, death, nature, landscape, science, humans – or the visual arts – including perception, illusion, perception and empathy in arts found from the artist’s studio to the museums… all this followed by “writing invitations.” Why? Because (in Greimas’s terminology) the figurative dimension of a discourse necessarily is an invitation to prolong it into another figurative “discourse” – whether it is in the form of a poem, of an artistic creation, or a performance. And in my teaching – aimed at asking students to emulate the narrative or discursive logic of the texts under study – I constantly failed to allow my students to respond to the creative invitation of the figurative dimensions of the texts under study. This is what Janée Baugher does in a most fascinating way by amplifying the creative invitation of a multitude of very diverse examples that she offers us in The Ekphrastic Writer – Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction.
Daniel Patte, Professor Emeritus, Vanderbilt University. Author of The Religious Dimensions of Biblical Texts: Greimas's Structural Semiotics and Biblical Exegesis and translator of A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary.
July 19, 2021
I am a poet, a leader of poetry workshops for all ages and venues (both generative and critiquing), teacher of literature, a fan of Jenee Baugher and her work, and curious about poems and their reason to be and there how to be in the present and their past cultures and histories. This book deepens all I do, gives me background to read and teach and to write smarter and more deeply. She suggests poetry prompts for myself or my classes and peers, gives me accomplished examples of poems and art, informs me about ekphrastic poems from many centuries. Clearly laid out, the book gives invitation to write, analysis by poets themselves of their poems included in the text, and suggests further reading and further viewing of poems and art outside of the text's examples.
If you write, if you lead others into writing of poems or if you are a reader in search of understanding and enjoying both art and poems, together and separately, this book fulfills your need.
This book is my go-to gift for new teachers or teacher's ready for a worthy tool to freshen class plans.
If you write, if you lead others into writing of poems or if you are a reader in search of understanding and enjoying both art and poems, together and separately, this book fulfills your need.
This book is my go-to gift for new teachers or teacher's ready for a worthy tool to freshen class plans.
July 16, 2021
Creative writing requires writer and poet to look both inside and outside for inspiration, creativity, fresh ideas, interesting point of view, etc. This book helps with this challenge by describing writing influenced by the visual arts through self-reflection, creativity, and building characters, plot, and setting. Janee discusses creative processes, tools, techniques, and instruction that, when applied, will help poets and writers become better and more creative at their craft. Their readers will benefit as well. Buy, read and apply this outstanding handbook. You will be glad you did.
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May 30, 2022Fantastic read for anyone looking to bring beauty, art and creativity into their life or writing!
Ms. Baugher possesses a mastery of writing, poetry, perception and intellect that are rare to find. The uniqueness of this subject is both intriguing and incredibly gorgeous. Connecting with beauty and art can be a meditation in itself. Ms. Baugher's book informs readers on how to take action to connect deeply to beauty and art and from this place, tap into their own creative energy. This book is a beautiful gift to give yourself, or anyone in your life who appreciates (or could use inspiration) about connecting with beauty and art to awaken our inner creative.
Ms. Baugher possesses a mastery of writing, poetry, perception and intellect that are rare to find. The uniqueness of this subject is both intriguing and incredibly gorgeous. Connecting with beauty and art can be a meditation in itself. Ms. Baugher's book informs readers on how to take action to connect deeply to beauty and art and from this place, tap into their own creative energy. This book is a beautiful gift to give yourself, or anyone in your life who appreciates (or could use inspiration) about connecting with beauty and art to awaken our inner creative.
August 9, 2021
This gem of a book introduced me to the process of using an investigative spirit when engaging with art. I appreciated both the author’s expertise on the subject and suggestions for gaining a deeper reading of the visual arts so as to inspire the creative process to take flight in a new form such as a poem or short story. The Ekphrastic Writer is rich with content and exercises, keeping the reader engaged in the process and learning new ways to expand one’s interpretation of what they are viewing and channeling that inspiration into a new creative outlet. I highly recommend!
July 19, 2021
Janée J. Baugher's The Ekphrastic Writer is an indispensable guide for teaching art-inspired poetry and deepening the appreciation of visual art in all its facets. As an artist and an ekphrastic poet myself, I keep this book on my bedside table and leaf through it on regular basis.
The Ekphrastic Writer is a wonderful source of inspiration for writers at every stage of their career as well as for art lovers.
The Ekphrastic Writer is a wonderful source of inspiration for writers at every stage of their career as well as for art lovers.
August 9, 2021
I thought I knew what ekphrastic poetry was, but this text exponentially expanded my knowledge and sparked a new-found love of form. I found it enlightening, inspiring, and motivating. I dog-eared pages and underlined quotes with an abandon rare for me and certainly rare for a text! I will keep it close at hand as I plan to refer back to it often. Thank you, Ms. Baugher, for sharing your expertise and passion for ekphrases. I'm hooked!
July 19, 2021
Discover Ekphrastic Writing!
The Ekphrastic Writer is a comprehensive guide to writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction inspired by art. This book will help writers explore the process of responding verbally to visual art, and it will help teachers plan relevant lessons. Highly recommended!
The Ekphrastic Writer is a comprehensive guide to writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction inspired by art. This book will help writers explore the process of responding verbally to visual art, and it will help teachers plan relevant lessons. Highly recommended!
August 13, 2021
As a writer, I find this book extremely helpful. I knew nothing of ekphrastic writing but after reading this I have been able to write flash fiction stories and incorporate it into my novel. I would definitely recommend!
July 15, 2021
Absolutely amazing book for all writers wanting to learn about art influenced poetry!
September 30, 2021
Janee Baugher's creative writing guidebook The Ekphrastic Writer is an amazing introduction to looking deeply into the visual arts and responding with one's own poetry or prose, using the many writing exercises she provides. I have long felt inspired to write by the visual arts, but now I have this rich resource to understand the art better and take my responses so much further. I recommend this book to any creative writer, lover of art, or teacher of the visual or literary arts.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews