The Reverse Selfie Project is a 6-week, creative-and-critical thinking workshop. For students who have never lived without technology at their fingertips, we are giving them a moment of stillness. This is where the difficult virtue of practice, concentration, discipline, wrestling with the ego, and revision come into practice. Our goal is to foster a new generation of curious thinkers who play an active role in the world going on around them. When we are the center of our world we cannot see (or serve) the real world. With the rise of a Kardashian-rich and value-poor culture, we hope to turn the perspective around from self to community. By analyzing our inner selves through poetry, we increase our capacity to know and care for ourselves; empowering us to contribute to our community, instead of depending on our community for resources.
Programs
The Reverse Selfie Project
One way I practiced Altruism this week was:
“I gave a homeless man $20.”
“Buying Christmas presents instead of the video game I wanted.”
“I let others speak first, walk first, and eat first.”
My Favorite line I wrote during the Acrostic workshop was:
“Independently on my own.”
“Determined to find love so much that he’d die for it.”
“Forgive but don’t forget.”
My favorite part of the Reverse Selfie Project is:
“Expressing who I am.”
“I get to come up with ideas without hesitating.”
“The teacher.”
The Curious Poets Club
The Curious Poets Club has and will continue to inspire curiosities in myriad topics including science, technology, nature, visual art, music and more. During each week of the workshop, instructor Annie Jones presents a new concept and asks questions to muse students’ imaginations.
Some call it the “summer brain drain”, says Scott McConnell, a professor of educational psychology. The “summer slide” is the tendency for students, especially those from low-income families, to lose some of the achievement gains they made during the previous school year.
Our goal is to keep low-income kiddos off the streets, out of trouble, and to keep them on the opposite side of the summer and spring slides by offering them innovative experiences.
Because writing is a mirror that asks a lot of us, we are asking students to open the door to those deeper, hidden, places of their potential. When they think, discuss, and synthesize their ideas into writing, doorknobs open to new places.
“With the increasing amount of screen time kiddos have today, MUSED is excited to offer young students a reprieve from answers, the infinite amount of information we have at our fingertips, and give them a couple hours for their minds to wander in a curious way, to ask questions.”
Victoria McArtor, co-founder
“What do I want to be in this world? What do I want to offer and how do I want to do it while being the most joyful version of myself as possible? I feel privileged and responsible to be a voice of encouragement for that age group – for them to start asking themselves those questions of identity and longing.”
Annie Jones, workshop instructor
“I think poetry invites kids to play with words and the styles of expression,” he says. “So much of prose requires following specific rules and getting graded. These workshops are an invitation to use poetry to process emotion and experiences without the evaluation of grading and the anxiety of the end-of-year exams.”
Dr. Bradley Brummel, University of Tulsa
POP
Hosted in the best bars, restaurants, galleries, and event spaces, POP is a “poetry-on-poetry” reading and writing series. We perform famous poems from the past and invite our audience to write and perform poems of their own. All for the sake of opening the minds and musing the inspirations of our community, we eat cake, we drink, we get to know complete strangers in a wonderfully intimate way.
Order your own themed POP event for corporate groups, baby showers, graduations, and more. Simply contact us for more information.
