generative writing for social change

Perhaps you have felt alone before in your writing and activist work, particularly in the pandemic. Perhaps you have felt the weight of always being called upon to explain your right to breathe and live free. 2020 has shown itself to be a time of consciousness raising and change. This workshop centers the voices and experiences of BIPOC writers (and those who would like to use writing as a medium) to do the work of revolution, reconciliation, and reckoning. We have been guided by visionaries long before now. Those in power have always feared philosophers and artists; we are those who conceptualize and inspire change. In this month of daily prompts, we will study the work of such movement prophets, philosophers, and artists across disciplines while we write for social change and action. We will study as inspiration the work of folks like June Jordan, Melvin Dixon, Marsha P. Johnson, Aurora Levins Morales, Camille Dungy, Octavia Butler, Natasha Marin, Regie Cabico, Pamela K. Santos, Barbara Jane Reyes, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Shin Yu Pai and more. We are called to radical imagination of the world as it could be and a true reckoning with what it is. Together we will dare to write our liberation stories in the now and for the future. We can also hold the intention of healing ourselves/communities/ancestors/more through the liberatory practice of visioning, writing, and enacting a new day.

Upcoming sessions:

• Sept 15 to Oct 15, 2020

generative writing across genre and literary forms (BIPOC only)

In this workshop, co-learners will engage in daily writing, workshop, and accountability partners in line with the Write Side by Side practices with a core focus on craft. Prompts are built around literary craft readings to push an exploration of form in poetry and prose. In addition, in the last two weeks of the class, prompts are personalized according to the interests (in subject, genre, and craft aspect) of the persons in the class.

Upcoming sessions:

• Feb 1 to March 1, 2021

generative writing using poetry as inspiration

How do you paint the page with language brush strokes? How might you transmute your hand into a wand set to create a new reality? This is the class where poets are invited into a practice with magic or an intention-based conjuring of visions on the page and beyond it. In this workshop, core inspiration readings will come from contemporary queer and BIPOC writers (across genre who explore poetic sensibilities in stanza or in prose) while prompts will incorporate explorations of poetic practice. This is a class for any writer who wants to expand their literary toolbox towards greater invention in vision and language.

Upcoming sessions:

• April 1 to May 1, 2021

hybridity and hybrid texts across all artistic disciplines and practices

BREAK FREE! In this class, we go wild and explore artistic practices across disciplines as a way of inspiring our writing. Take an Afro Beat dance class, spend a day listening to punk, immerse yourself in the bounty of sound in an opera, take a chipped plate and smash it to pieces! All of these practices and more support an embodied exploration of creativity. We work together to identity the daily joys in our creative practice of wonder and discovery. And joy is something that this class celebrates! Writing can sometimes feel weighted for so many different reasons. In this class, we encourage shaking loose of shame or fear or false modesty or self-doubt. Your work is urgent and necessary and transformational! Together we learn strategies to push beyond our limits and the limits of our knowledge or the form of our work to something decidedly new, exciting, and welcome in its shock and glory.

Upcoming sessions:

• July 1 to July 31, 2021