Professor Matty Davis Challenges Students to Write in Motion

On a Wednesday afternoon in Kent Hall, a dozen students stand in a circle outside the classroom, eyes closed, arms linked. Each person's fingers rest on someone else's wrist, feeling for a pulse. A minute earlier, those same students were scattered around the hallway: running up and down the stairs, doing jumping jacks, trying to raise their heart rates. Now they stand in silence.

This is not your typical writing workshop. It is "Body and Word," an Undergraduate Creative Writing course taught by Adjunct Assistant Professor Matty Davis, whose work spans writing, dance, and visual arts. The course challenges an oft-unexamined assumption of writing education: that writers and students are, in Davis's words, "floating brains” or people always “sitting behind desks."

"The course is designed to challenge students to come in contact with the multiple layers that make up a body," Davis explained over coffee. "From our emotional and psychological systems to the more material systems like our skeleton, like the details of a joint. We aim to see what kind of meaning and ways [of understanding] our experience in the world might exist in these highly specific places in our body."

Davis, who has developed an art form called "performance arranged for print" since 2021, brings his interdisciplinary background to writing pedagogy. His approach combines writing, photography, choreography, and experimental publishing methods, informed by collaborations with artists, writers, surgeons, carpenters, and athletes. His work has been presented at the High Line, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, often in site-specific locations from mountains to hurricane-churned shorelines.

The session of “Body and Word” I was invited to sit in on began with students gathered around a large table—a common object which is defamiliarized in Davis’ class, turned into both subject and stage. Students performed movements on top of it, noting the details of each other’s gestures: which arm was on top, which way the head turned. These movements were then combined with a word game, where each pose inspired language, creating a sometimes poetic, sometimes funny sequence of utterances reminiscent of surrealist word games like exquisite corpse, where writers pass around a piece of writing, read only the last line, and continue it.

For the pulse-taking exercise, students gathered to sense each other's rhythms, then wrote for one minute about the experience. Towards the end of the class, they took turns standing on top of the table to perform their pieces—poems that attempted to capture their physical connection to their peers.

Central to Davis's teaching philosophy is the belief that physical engagement can unlock new paths for creative expression. "I see the body as such a profound site of memory and association," he said. "To write about my knee is potentially a door into my history as a runner or the contusion I had on my patella. Learning the specificity of these different sites in the body gives students ever more refined portals to memory, to how our body is connected to political forces, how it's shaped by architecture."

The approach aims to offer space for exploration with intellectual rigor. "There is really a balance between recognizing the way in which the body has been portrayed in literature, while also looking at intellectual frameworks in the context of disability, visual arts, and the history of philosophy," Davis noted. The course incorporates texts ranging from phenomenology to disability studies, creating a foundation for embodied writing practice.

The classroom becomes a laboratory for what Davis calls "dehabituation"—breaking from patterns of movement and thought. Like in the pulse-taking exercise, a given session often takes students outside the classroom to explore how their bodies interact with space and architecture. These investigations can extend beyond the university through field trips to venues like Judson Church, where students engaged with live dance performances earlier in the semester.

Conversations about disability and inclusivity are also a key part of the course. When a student showed hesitation due to back pain during a table exercise, Davis offered modifications, demonstrating how the movements could be adapted using just their free arm. "All backgrounds and experiences and degrees of ability are welcome," Davis emphasized. "The body is about difference—that's something I value with the students. There's meaning in all of these places."

Building on this undergraduate course, Davis will offer "The Physicality of Language" to graduate students in Spring 2025. The seminar takes its inspiration from Karl Ove Knausgård's observation that "for the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops." In a world saturated by images of bodies—running, fighting, mourning, aging, celebrating—the course asks how writers can convey and describe their or their characters' physical presence in their ongoing writing projects. 

"We're trying to talk about bodies in a very bedrock type way," Davis reflected. The result is a course that challenges not just how we write about physical experience, but how we understand the relationship between our bodies and our creative practice. In a world mediated by screens, Davis's approach offers a reminder: before we became floating brains, we were—and still are—bodies in constant motion.