Online Classes
We believe writing always takes place in relation to other writing, other thoughts, other people and everyday spaces. With this conviction, we design our classes so that lived experience animates the abstractness of theory and, reciprocally, so that creative work engenders its own ways of knowing. Our method is part study of writing that troubles easy definitions of self and theory, part creative writing workshop for experimenting with new forms for writing about embodied theory. We read a range of texts and cull from them strategies for our own use. Each class includes discussion of readings and mini workshops related to the writing prompts. Participants are invited to bring their nascent or established projects, praxes, and stubborn constellations of questions, and to learn from the projects, praxes, and questions of other participants.
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Past Classes
Class 3: (Dis/Re)Orientation: Navigating Self, Theory, and Location
September 8 - October 13, 2022
This course takes up the theme Orientation and its companion states, disorientation and reorientation. Using these terms as a point of departure, we’ll trace inquiries into the shifting coordinates by which we relate to place, to others, and to ourselves. We’ll ask: How do we orient in our worlds, and how might these latitudes and longitudes lead to disorientation or a call for reorientation? In what ways do direction and confusion, displacement and replacement, contribute to our experiences of daily life and movement? How do our entanglements in systems of power lead us to feel identified or dis-identified with the people and environments that surround us? What kind of knowledge shapes our many methods of orienting, and how can writing deepen or interrupt those approaches? In what ways does writing serve as a tactic for seeing and crafting different ways of being—of reorienting towards the social, political, and economic futures we want?
Class 2: Writing the Self and Theory: Experiments in Body + Form
June 5 - July 10, 2022
What forms of writing emerge from a creative-critical engagement with our everyday lives? This course draws together creative writing and critical theory to experiment with novel approaches to self-reflective writing. Animating our study and practice is a consideration of the specific kinds of knowledge production that personal writing engenders. We’ll consider provocations raised in recent discussions of autotheoretical texts, visiting debates on how to write ethically about the self, others, and our varied positions in racial, capitalist, sexual, gendered, and imperialist systems. We will ask: What is at stake when we write from our first-person perspectives? In what ways does creative writing produce its own forms of knowledge? How might the privileged status accorded to theory and theoretical discourses be disrupted or re-formed through a critical practice of creativity? How can experimental writing—however we might define or practice it—leverage this knowledge to intervene in the theoretical-historical-political forces that impinge upon our bodies and worlds?
Class 1: Autotheory as Practice
February 10 - March 17, 2022
This course takes autotheory as a prompt and provocation. Less a call to define the latest literary buzzword, we instead use its base terms to proliferate questions about theories and practices of writing. We’ll ask: How do historical-political forces shape and sort our bodies and worlds? How can writing serve as a tactic for seeing and interrupting these forces? With what textual experiments might we render our situatedness in racial, capitalist, sexual, gendered, and imperialist systems in complexly layered ways? What other ethical practices might emerge from these inquiries of the self? Part study of writing that troubles easy definitions of both self and theory, part creative writing workshop for experimenting with new forms for theory and self, this course will cultivate a hybrid inquiry into the personal-political possibilities of writing from our varied embedded conditions.