Thursdays, 8 PM – 9:15 PM EST
July 10 – August 7 | Over Zoom
$175-$300 Sliding Scale
All skill levels encouraged!
Writing, we are told, attempts to capture truth; and “truth,” Julia Kristeva writes, is “barren… without makeup, without seeming, rotten and dead, full of discomfort and sickness.” This workshop thinks through reading and writing poems and prose in the tones, registers, and images that invoke that truth: the abject, the horrifying, the queer, the disabled and disabling, and the intimate. Drawing on writers and artists including Ai Ogawa, Hiromi Itō, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Edie Fake, Marina De Van, and Greer Lankton, the 5 week class will ask students to write their own selves into work, finding ways to find solace through that discomfort. Ultimately, this workshop asks: What scares (or revolts) you? Who is scared (or is revulsed) by you? And what’s the difference between those two questions?
Taught by Zefyr Lisowski, author of the forthcoming Uncanny Valley Girls (Harper Perennial 2025), students can expect to come away from this class with a chapbook of cross-genre writing. Heads-ups will be provided for especially intense reading.
Email at the link above or at zef.lisowski [at] gmail.com with a short paragraph expressing interest to sign up. Students of all identities and experience levels welcome.