TEACHING
Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway: Reading, Writing, Workshop
Hosted by Politics & Prose, Washington’s premier bookstore. Registration is available here.
Join novelist and professor Sarah Pleydell and author Michaele Weissman for a three-part deep dive into the context, craft, and continuing impact of Virginia Woolf’s prescient post-World War I novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Published 1925, Woolf’s masterwork speaks to the concerns of our time as few novels do.
A slender novel focused on a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upperclass woman, no longer young, who is hosting a party, Mrs. Dalloway focuses on the very stuff of life—Virginia Woolf’s life and our lives too. Employing floating points of view, Woolf delicately, deftly, addresses the inner and outer experience of her characters. Among the topics Woolf examines are: the brutalizing impact of World War I; madness and sanity; the relations between men and women; same sex love; social dissolution and the possibility of social change. All this, in the context of a beautifully written, sometimes humorous novel celebrating the desire of humans to gather together.
Prior to the workshop, students are asked to read the novel. In class discussions will focus on the historical, social, and psychological contexts from which the novel emerged, as well as its craft and artistic power. A close in-class reading of selected passages will facilitate these explorations. In-class writing exercises are designed to help students, as readers and as writers, to fathom the “how-to” of the novel, including the techniques Virginia Woolf employed to capture character from the outside in and from the inside out. The in-class writing prompts are designed to encourage students to experiment—not the production of polished copy.
beginnings
My grandmother in her Montessori classroom
I come from a family of teachers. My grandmother was a pioneer Montessori teacher and principal of her own school by the time she was twenty-five. My mother was a brilliant history teacher, and my children and my nieces and nephews have all inherited the gene. After graduating with a bachelors in English literature from Oxford University and a postgraduate teaching qualification from London University, I found my sea legs teaching high school in Lesotho in Southern Africa. I launched my arts integration career after I arrived in the US thanks to the volunteering requirement at my son’s pre-school. I couldn’t drive on the right side of the road or make head or tail of brownie recipes, so I threw myself into dramatic play with a class of four year olds. My teaching trajectory has been eclectic, granted, but it adheres to its own unique logic. Living in the company of developing minds and hearts is a blessing and a privilege. It renews my faith in the deeper resources of humanity and in its future.
Arts integration
Collaborating with writer and artist, Cynthia Matsakis, we pioneered the inclusion of multi-sensory stimulation into participatory drama experiences with young children. I was a master artist at the Wolftrap Institute for Early Leaning Through the Arts for over twenty years where I taught classroom residences, presented teacher training workshops , and travelled to Greece with their international outreach program. With Victoria Brown, I co-authored the Dramatic Difference. Since 2001, Vickie and I have offered workshops at the Lucy School, whose early childhood program models the curriculum that we lay out in our book. In 2014, I was part of the team that wrote the core standards for the national arts curriculum, which you can read here.
In the spring of 2021, I was a guest lecturer for the Theatre for Young Audiences MFA program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
My current focus is using the performing arts to support young children in processing the difficult feelings and experiences of the pandemic years. With Kofi Dennis, I will be leading residencies of “The Singing to the Monster Project” in Washington DC in the fall of 2021.
Some years ago in Galax, Virginia, I was leading a story drama based on a Pawnee legend about an outsider child befriended by a magical pony. A tow-haired six year old, with many challenges of his own, latched onto this story as though his life depended on it. After the boy has absorbed what his spirit pony has to teach, the pony leaves him. “How did the boy feel?” I asked the class. “The boy wasn’t sad or lonely anymore,” my friend chirped up, “because the pony left his hoofprints in his heart.”
College seminars
After receiving my MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland I taught at the university for over thirty years. I developed a number of humanities, literature and creative writing seminars for the Honors College: favorites include, “The Mystery of the Face; Mask or Mirror, Image or Identity” and “Black Holes and B Movies: Aesthetic Representations of New Physics.” In 2005, I won the Award for Outstanding Honors Faculty and gave the Honors convocation address. I used my last years at Maryland to devise the immersive workshop format that I still use today.
Creative Writing Workshops
Since 2017, my friend, author Michaele Weissman, and I have been leading our popular writing workshop in the Washington, DC area called: Unexpected Knowledge: Imagery in Fiction and Nonfiction. This workshop is designed to help writers discover images stored in memory. To facilitate this process, we have created a series of playful writing exercises that help students generate language and observations from their lived experiences and work creatively with this material.
Praise for my teaching at New Directions, a three-year postgraduate training program for clinicians, academicians, and writers.
“In her teaching, Sarah is palpably present and persistently creative. She offers herself to her students in such a way as to integrate who she is as a human being, a writer and an actress. She manages to convey a strength-in-vulnerability coupled with self-possession that is enormously appealing. These qualities encourage her students to join with her in writing openly. There is a bit of fire to the way that Sarah embraces the world. She is also, I believe, a true humanist. I have found it a pleasure to learn from her.” — Marc Nemiroff, author, psychoanalyst