Exit Strategies

Exit Strategies: Professional Development for
Writers

According to Ye Olde Wikipedia, an exit strategy
is "a means of leaving one's current situation,
either after a predetermined objective has been
achieved, or as a strategy to mitigate failure.
An organisation or individual without an exit
strategy may be in a quagmire." Anxious? Fear
not! In support of (developing) your exit
strategies, the goals of this course are to
1. Create Future Visions: Here, this means
excavating and understanding past and present
relationships-to work, money, power, fame,
ambition, genre, competition, success, failure,
authority, ethics-towards thriving in that
ever-fabulous and unknown tomorrow.
2. Cultivate Professional Practices: On the
surface, this is necessary nuts and bolts. CVs,
portfolios, networking, verbal communication and
interviewing skills, self-presentation and
promotion, knowing and playing the field(s),
keeping current, staying afloat, are all part of
the toolkit. But it's deeper than this. See
above.
3. Maintain Creative Life: Are you a producer
as well as a maker? A collaborator or collective
visionary? An interdisciplinary interloper?
Salons, reading series, online/print
publications, collectives, alternative schools,
technological interfaces and more will be
explored here, to fuel your own productivity and
support others'.
To do this work together, we'll have insights
from our Thursday Visiting Artists, as well as
guest-run workshops and seminars, music, film,
writing exercises and experiments, webinars and
presentations, archival materials from
autodidacts, critical and creative texts, some
oldies-but-goodies from my journey's jump bag,
and whatever you bring to the course from the
path you took to get here, the one you're on, or
the one you're trying to get to.