WORKSHOP: Composing “Factless Autobiographies” with Mary Wang

The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa wrote under as many as 72 different names, describing himself as “the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.” He called these “heteronyms”: characters he embodied that conversed and argued with each other across multiple texts.

Amidst a political climate in which the first person “I”/“us” is becoming an antagonistic defense against the third person “he”/"she”/“them”, can switching point-of-view, literally and literarily, help us see things from a different perspective?

This workshop by writer, editor, and radio producer Mary Wang will use literary exercises to help participants draw up what Pessoa calls “factless autobiographies”. These will be recorded in audio and, after the workshop, stitched together as a “common story” featured on Radius, an online radio station convened by artist Christian Nyampeta.