Past Workshops 

Workshop 14: **How-to Process Series** Endings: How to Conclude

(December 9, 2023)

Come discuss how to wrap up a project persuasively, poetically, and confidently, even as you know the writing is never done. Whether sketching the first draft of an ending or putting on a truly final gloss, this workshop will help you think critically and creatively about the act of ending. Possible excerpts and writing prompts will be culled from Clarice Lispector, Samuel Delany, Zadie Smith, or others.

Workshop 13: Body & Form

(November 11, 2023)

Body & Form asks how we bring our embodied selves into conjunction with theoretical work. Within the now-familiar categories of autotheory and autofiction, we’ve seen a range of experiments with how writing about the self blends with theoretical concepts from a host of disciplinary frameworks. Body & Form asks how writing from embodied perspectives affects the formal qualities of your writing, as well as how the formal innovations of your writing fold back on how you perceive embodied experiences. What does it mean to write from the body? How does the body of the text contain or challenge lived experiences? What formal feature capture sensation or memory, and how might you make a space for new gestures, possibilities, and performances of self within your writing? Readings will include work by Saeed Jones, Renee Gladman, and Hélène Cixous.

Workshop 12: Genre Trouble

(October 14, 2023)

Genre Trouble engages with some of the key questions of disparate first-person theoretical work. Whether under the auspices of autotheory or autofiction, conceptual and performance art about the self, or academic writing that draws on personal anecdote, the last few decades have seen an explosion of writing that blends theoretical concerns with lived experience. Genre Trouble invites you to play with genre conventions and reflect on the ways that you engage experimentation in your work. We'll ask how playing with genre conventions can be serious work -- how experimenting with ways of writing theory and self can help critically revision history, place, relationality, and everyday experience. Readings will include work by Gloria Anzaldúa, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Donna Haraway.

Workshop 11: **How-to Process Series** Middles Part II: How to Keep Going

(September 9, 2023)

What does it mean to find oneself in the middle of a project? For some, the middle is a danger zone, a place full of pitfalls requiring heroic arcs, clean through-lines, and dramatic climaxes to keep a reader’s attention. In this How-to Process workshop, we’ll take a more playful stance, bringing a critical eye to the task of continuing a project while expanding our sense of the shapes it might take. We’ll ask: How does our idea of a text change over the course of writing it? What unexpected patterns, structures, and concepts might we cultivate in our work? How can we work not just with our plans for our writing, but the themes that emerge in the process of carrying them out? Texts will include excerpts from Jane Alison, Anna Tsing, and Jia Tolentino.

Note: This workshop is the second of four in our How-to Process Series.

Workshop 10: Youth

(August 12, 2023)

To write about our youth is to court past selves, to articulate theories of history and time, and to practice an implicit or explicit autobiographical politics. In this workshop, we will bring a critical eye to these tasks while experimenting with techniques that give us options for carrying them out creatively and with care. We’ll ask: How do we choose the stories with which we narrate our past, and what relation do those stories have to our present-day selves? How do we render the everyday texture of times past, missed paths, ongoing aftermaths, and imagined futures? What ethics and politics guide us as we work to narrate our selves in history, and history in our selves? Texts will include excerpts from bell hooks, Hua Hsu, and Kathleen Stewart.

Workshop 9: Sound

(July 8, 2023)

To speak of sound in the silent art of writing lands one in stuttering territory. On approach to this territory might be by way of Roland Barthes who considers the peculiar sound of language as a “rustle.” To rustle, Barthes suggests, “is to make audible the very evaporation of sound; the blurred, the tenuous, the fluctuating are perceived as signs of a sonic erasure.” This workshop invites participants to reflect on the ways language rustles (in) their writing. In what ways does writing touch on or gesture toward sounds that resist capture? How does sound add detail as much as abstraction? In what ways does sound contribute to your style? How might sound be a source for writing or a way to figure multiple perspectives? How does sound interrupt writing or situate us in relation to a time and a place? Excerpts and writing prompts will be drawn from one of more of the following: Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, Kamau Brathwaite, “Nation Language,” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, or Heather McHugh, Broken English.

Workshop 8: MIddles I: How to Get Un-Stuck

(June 10, 2023)

Work through blocks and obstacles, both internal and external, to stay engaged in a project that’s underway. Together, we’ll explore some of the sticking points encountered while writing and strategies for moving through them. Possible readings include work by Elvia Wilk, Emily Ogden, and Kathy Acker.

Note: This workshop is the second of four in our How-to Process Series.

Workshop 7: Public Secrets

(May 13, 2023)

“Where ever there is power there is secrecy,” writes Michael Taussig in Defacement, “except it is not only secrecy that lies at the core of power, but public secrecy.” Public secrecy is a mode of discourse that doesn’t hide information so much as hold it in a complex game of veiling and unveiling, concealing and exposure, repression and reckoning. For Taussig, “you don't exactly ‘keep’ a public secret so much as know how to be kept by it.” In this writing workshop, we’ll take public secrets as our object of inquiry, asking: How can discourses of visibility and transparency act as red herrings or gestures of misdirection? How do we internalize, in our bodily habits and modes of attention, the public secrets of the state, the institution, the family, our communities? What practices of writing might help us notice the forces constraining how we can and can’t say about both structural violence and the everyday texture of our lives? In what ways might writing help us think about justice beyond the simple play of what’s seen and what’s not? Possible texts include excerpts from Michael Taussig’s Defacement, Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Poupeh Missaghi’s Trans(re)lating House One, and others.

Workshop 6: Literary Montage

(April 8, 2023)

Writing is inherently about collecting. Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin — who uses the term literary montage to imagine a work comprised only of quotations — this workshop invites participants to reflect on the actual and implicit collections that inspire their writing. Whether composed of images, memories, seashells, fashion, or citational fragments, these collections move objects from one context to another and shape our thinking in unpredictable and potentially productive ways. In what ways do we stylize a literary image of our self and others through the quotes or objects we collect? How might collecting be an aid to writing a plurality of perspectives? How do remembered passages, archives of feeling, photographs, or found objects cut into our writing? How do our collections help locate us in particular times and places? Possible readings include excerpts from Benjamin’s Arcade Project, Cherie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years, Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, Dionne Brand’s An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, or others.

Workshop 5: Beginnings: How to Start

(March 11, 2023)

A space to commune with people beginning a project, or restarting one. We’ll ask what it means to begin, consider craft questions specific to the starting phases, and work through writing prompts to proliferate our paths forward. Possible readings include Edward Said, Jose Muñoz, Gabrielle Civil, Melissa Febos, Lucy Ives, Toni Morrison, and others.

Workshop 4: Laughter and Jokes

(February 11, 2023)

Laughter is a complicated impulse. It can erupt out of our unconscious, signaling joy, play, and spontaneity. It can be a mode of bullying, a method for placating, or a signal that, whatever our true feelings, we’re going along with a norm. It can draw a line between in- and out-groups in both oppressive and liberatory fashions. How can writing about laughter and jokes help tune us in to the spectrum of communication that takes place beyond conscious speech? How might we embrace the unfunny role of interrupting communication that proves violent – to revel in being the killjoy, the wet blanket, or the unsmiling pill? How might we revitalize our thinking and relating with bursts of authentic silly wildness? How, in other words, can laughter and jokes be a lever by which we not only notice but remake the subtleties of everyday conversation and discourse? Possible texts include Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy, Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy, Wendy S Walters’ Multiply/Divide, and others.

Workshop 3: Forgetful Memory

(January 14, 2023)

It’s possible that nothing is more intrinsic, more vital, more inextricable to storytelling than memory. Whether conjuring Mnemosyne, the Greek god of memory and mother to the muses, or noting the prosaic qualities of memoire, it is hard to imagine telling a story—or narration of any kind for that matter—without memory. And yet memory is inseparable from forgetting. How does forgetting shape what we remember, and what we write? In what ways does writing bend around what is forgotten? How might writing at the edges of forgetting engage with our relations to others? If memory helps locate us in particular times and places, where does forgetting place us? Could self-effacement be a form of forgetting the self, of repressing a first-person singular position in favor of engaging with others? What kind of writing might emerge at the limits of what Maurice Blanchot calls Forgetful Memory? For the inaugural workshop under our new name, we might also ask how forgetting enables all writing, and, therefore, writing infinitely, an infinite text. Possible readings include excerpts from Maurice Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation, Lydia Davis’s Almost No Memory, Jacques Derrida’s Memories for Paul de Man, Masha Tupitsyn’s Picture Cycle, Paige Clark’s She is Haunted, among others.

Workshop 2: Exemplarity

(October 12, 2022)

What does it mean to make an example of someone or something? How is it that a small detail, a single event, or an individual person becomes generalized into a bellwether or a case study? This critical-creative writing workshop invites a consideration of how we employ part-to-whole relationships in our work and thought, to ask how one comes to stand for many. We’ll consider how something exemplary comes to be paradigmatic for normative systems of knowledge and power. How do the norms of capitalist systems—as much as aesthetic ones—isolate and aggregate a body or an episode? How might we unravel such example-making practices through everyday acts of writing and thinking? This workshop will delve into the ways that singularity and specificity are made to matter historically, politically, aesthetically, and ethically.

Workshop 1:

Salvage

(September 17, 2022)

What does it mean to do salvage work? What are the politics and praxes of gleaning, bricolage, and doing-it-yourself? Salvage is conceived by some thinkers as the act of making do in the face of precarity and systemic violence, while others emphasize how those same violent systems – capitalism, colonialism, and other extractive practices – thrive through their own version of the practice. To salvage suggests working with left-overs – with history’s many materials, traces, and residues – and implies a connection with the past while transforming it for use in the present or the future. For this workshop we invite you to activate your salvage-sensibilities in relation to your writing practice and come prepared to learn from others’.