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Classes & Seminars

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Writing And/As the Mother with Amanda Montei

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Writers, artists, and theorists have long used the figure of The Mother to make sense of what we seek in writing, art, and politics. Today, The Mother remains a receptacle for all our cultural anxieties and longings. And yet, the work of taking care, cleaning up, and maintaining life—which someone must do to make space for creative practice— is too often rendered invisible. How have the body and labor of The Mother shaped our ideas of comfort, home, work, and novelty? How does caring for others, big and small, teach us to care on the page? Should the book be a space in which we are held, or perhaps something else entirely? In this 4-week course, we will discuss the cultural and political influences that…

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$350

The Stacks Coffeehouse: October 2021 Writing Class

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Generative, Drop-in Writing Class @ The Stacks Coffeehouse $20 for 4 weeks Buy now This class will be focused exclusively on creating new work, with prompts sent out every Friday morning via email (starting October 1st) and live student readings via Zoom every Thursday at 7pm PST, where everyone will be encouraged to share their works-in-progress in answer to the prompt (The last class reading will be October 28th). All levels are welcome. Prompts are geared toward flash fiction, but we love nonfiction and poetry too. Generative: This class is generative, which means we’ll be focused on generating new work rather than polishing existing work. Prompts will be emailed on Fridays, and the class with meet live every Thursday at 7pm to share work. Unlike…

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$20

Writing Beyond Stereotypes of Disability

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Characters with disabilities have been around as long as there have been stories, but often those characters are based on stereotypes that serve as plot shortcuts and end up being harmful to real people with disabilities. Disability is one of humanity’s most shared traits. It is inevitable that to write characters you will write disability. This class will use model texts and generative writing exercises to explore how to go beyond stereotypes such as the one-handed villain, the pitiable cripple, and the inspirational athlete, to write nuanced characters that honor human diversity on the page. Because we live in an able world, discussions and exercises will also touch on writing disabled worlds and how to reveal the often invisible expectations of ablism in our current…

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$95

Oracles and Creativity: Designing Your Own Symbolic System

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In this follow-up to Oracles, Intuition, and Creativity, we will go deeper into our exploration of sets of symbols and how they function as tools for self-study and guides for artistic creation. The class will begin with a brief survey of the history of divination and an analysis of various types of oracles (their art, symbolism, and structures), including a conversation with contemporary oracle designers about their practices. Each participant will then design their own oracle system and write a guide for its use. No artistic ability is needed for this class, but there will be an opportunity at the end of the five weeks to attend a special session with a hands-on creative component; details will be given in class. While it is not…

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$240

Delve Readers Seminar: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is one of the most celebrated & impactful books ever written. Since its publication over 50 million copies of the novel have been sold. The story follows the Buendía family & the other residents of Macondo through seven generations, depicting everything from civil war to flying carpets. The lush prose creates a transportive narrative that ever expands in all directions, exploring & complexifying the themes of colonialism & imperialism, the malleability of time, familial elitism, & humanity’s struggle to justify life. “Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to…

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$240

Multiplicity — A 4-Week Generative Writing Lab w/ Daniel Elder

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

WHAT: A 4-week generative online writing lab WHEN: The online class space—hosted on our rich interactive platform WetInk—opens Friday, October 8th. Weekly Zoom sessions will be held every Saturday morning at 10AM PST. (Zoom dates: 10/9, 10/16, 10/23, 10/30, 11/6.) ACCESS: $350. Sliding scale and/or payment plans available to all and sundry—contact Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com Do you want to write beyond a main character into multiple voices, bodies, and stories? Do you wanna fuck around with time? Do you wanna write into the multiverse? Do you wanna interrupt monomythologies and hero archetypes? If so, it sounds like you wanna fuck shit up and you've come to the right place. For four weeks in this generative online writing lab, we're going to plunge into these worlds…

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$350

Delve Readers Seminar: 9/11 Literatures and the Global War on Terror: 20th Anniversary

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

2021 marks the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack and a period classified as the “global war on terror.” In this Delve seminar we will read, reflect, and discuss the literary responses to the immediate and the long-term impacts of the war on terror and the rise of xenophobia, Islamophobia, and the changing socio-political landscape of American life post 9/11. The literary texts that we will read will provide some broad understanding about public anxiety and trauma, particularly for those who experienced 9/11 closely and those that belonged to the Muslim-American communities. We will also unpack various representations and debates surrounding the ways in which the figure of the terrorist, terrorism, torture, racism and Islamophobia have informed the study of the 9/11 genre. Please…

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$180

Writing Characters Who Take Up Space

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

For all the descriptive writing in the world, it is often difficult to fully realize a physical body in a physical space for a reader. Bodies are so varied, spaces contain so many possibilities, but both bodies and spatial possibilities are often overlooked in writing craft. This class will use ideas presented in Amy Cuddy’s book, Presence: Bringing your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, Bessel Van Der Kolk’s, The Body Keeps Score, and others, to present new ways of exploring the physical presence of characters on the page, their experiences with themselves, with their environment and with other characters. Access Program We want our writing classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present…

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$190

Inquiry as Narrative w/ Lilly Dancyger

The Corporeal Writing Center 510 SW 3rd Ave #101, Portland, OR, United States

Tuesday, October 12th, 5-8pm Pacific Cost: $150 payment plans available, email Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com Where: Corporeal Center, 510 SW 3rd Avenue, suite 101, Portland, Or. 97204 Description: There's often so much emphasis on plot and narrative, but there are other ways to move a story forward. Sometimes the most interesting thing isn't what happened, and then what happened next, and then what happened next—but what we have to say about what happened, and how our perspective on a single event can shift and change over time. How the very process of writing about an experience—and the research and inquiry that goes into writing about our own lives—can change our relationship to the thing we're writing about. In this session, we'll talk about how to shape…

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$150

Archiving Ancestors, Collective Grief, and the Illusion of Time

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The quiet and stillness of quarantine transported many of us beyond the bounds of time and space. Through our unexpected journeys, we may have traced new threads from ancestral roots to our present moments and felt them stretch towards an unknown somewhere on a vast continuum of time. Loss of place, people, and ways of being from the past, present, and anticipatory future left grief to linger and blur the edges of things. This generative writing series will invite us to craft multi-genre pieces that archive the transcendent, dizzying, perplexing, and new. We will honor our ancestors, known, unknown, and chosen. We will write from the dark blue of sorrow to expand our capacity for joy. We will dissolve the illusion of time to embody…

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$145
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