$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?
While this class ran through July 2026, it will return again summer 2027. Taught by Zefyr Lisowski, author of the 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.
Endorsements for the Course
Zefyr created a class that I have been itching for, dreaming about. A space to discuss the queer grotesque, explore new texts and resources in community, while also generating our own work in various mediums. Zefyr brought so much insight, care, curiosity, and thoughtfulness to the class. I left every session energized, haunted, inspired, and thirsty to keep exploring.
-Jazzy
The Queer Grotesque, an invigorating cross-genre course, with Zefyr Lisowski at the helm, was a delicious space to enter. In a virtual room holding a cozy number of other writers and artists, we were all invited to question and further rupture how one might craft language(s) for The Other, and of being othered. Under the passionate encouragement of Zefyr, we were all given room to speak on what salvation or liberation, as well as what new intimacies might wait for us/a community in the squelching folds of the grotesque. We were allowed to crack open worlds: of flesh, of desire, of the abject, of tenderness and grace for queered appetites. And with new worlds cracked open and questions confronted, new seams of slippery truths, identities, and eros also formed within our own individual works. The Queer Grotesque, Zefyr Lisowski as guide, opens a sacred space for beautiful monsters to flourish and find each other.
-Basilia
Each component of this course–its readings, its discussions, its instructor, its peers–would be reason enough on its own to take it. All these factors together, however, make for one of the most fun and challenging courses I’ve taken as a writer. How does one approach deep embodiment, and from there, how does one write about it? Where does disgust come from, and again, how does one convey that on the page? On top of that, are there forms of intimacy inherit in that disgust? I came to the course thinking I no longer had any boundaries or fears about my writing, but one month reframed the questions I have been asking myself. That said, Zefyr’s gentle and analytical approach and my peers’ curiosity helped cultivate an environment in which these new questions and explorations were shared and built upon. I’m excited for where my writing goes from here!
-Monique