Queering our texts

a playbook for writing from the margins

What does it mean to queer our texts? What is the meaning of queerness? What makes a text queer? And what does it mean to queer texts at this time when queer bodies and lives are under direct attack? Join fellow writers to examine examples of queer writing, explore a queer playbook (e.g. linguistic drag, promiscuous fluency, etc.), and work on some writing exercises in class, while we subvert normativities and standardization and bring a sense of play and care into our writing and revision practices.

This class will center queer experiences but is open to writers of all genres, regardless of how you identify.

Writing when the world is burning down

How to find our center and sustain a writing or artistic practice

Climate catastrophes. Rise of authoritarianism. Wars. Suppression and persecution of dissent. Masked militia kidnapping, even executing, our neighbors. Cruelty as national policy. Erasure of history. Whether we’re glued to the news or avoid it with all our might, we can’t escape what is happening around us. In times like this we may find it hard to get out of bed and face the day, let alone write anything meaningful. Join fellow Antioch alums as we explore somatic techniques and writing prompts that can help us find our center, and access internal and external resources that bring us into our zone of resilience. Leave the class with some ideas and tools that can help us stay grounded and sustain a meaningful and regenerative writing and artistic practice.

Inventing Language for Speculative Worldbuilding

Does everyone in your speculative world speak standard English (only), even the dragons and the aliens?

So, you’re building a different world. And you’re doing it with words. But what is the language (or languages) of your world? Does everyone speak standard contemporary English (only), even the dragons and the aliens? Depending on how different your world is from ours, chances are that you will need to describe things (people, fauna, flora, customs, technology, etc.) that you don’t have words for. You could of course develop your own language (e.g. elvish, Klingon, nadstat, etc.) but what can you do if you are not (and don’t wish to become) a linguist, or Tolkien?

In this class we will work with some simple but powerful and easily applied linguistic tools and concepts that will help you build a richer world for your story, one that has variety and nuance.

Letters from a Liberated Future

a writing workshop dedicated to imagining liberated futures, both on collective and personal subjects

Inspired by writing practices like the book everything for everyone: an oral history of the new york commune, 2052–2072 by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, we would like to invite participants to write and share their own wild, untameable, unimagined liberated future.

If you wonder how to write from a place of desire in times of (seemingly) endless defeats, this writing experiment will offer you some new tools.