- This event has passed.
Following the Brush: Experimenting with the Zuihitsu form
$325
Zuihitsu, a Japanese literary form dating from 1000 AD, offers a flexible hybrid architecture for essaying—and poeming. Zuihitsu’s potency arises from its palimpsest of seeming randomness, contradiction, and disorder. Poet Kimiko Hahn calls zuihitsu “a fungus—not plant or animal, but a species unto itself.” In this generative class, we’ll explore the form’s history, then follow the brush into the ecotone between prose poem and lyric essay. Along the way, we’ll push, stretch, and experiment with the form’s possibilities for internal reflection. Writers will leave class with first drafts of zuihitsu on topics of their choosing, which can be further refined at home.
Access Program
We want our writing classes and Delves to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and seminar tuitions at a reduced rate. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available.
Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org if you have questions.
Class cancellation policy
If you need to cancel your registration, our class cancellation policy is here
Gabriela Denise Frank
Gabriela Denise Frank writes about twenty-first century dreams: pop culture, nostalgia, individualism, burnout, midlife crisis, environmental entanglements, climate disruption, and songs of contamination, faith, nature, and identity. Her work is rooted in place: her native Detroit, the American West where she’s made a home, her ancestral homeland of Italy, and landscapes—urban, rural, and wild—around the world. She lives on traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples: the ancestral and unceded lands and waters of the Duwamish and Muckleshoot communities.
Her essays, interviews, hybrids, and short fiction have been published in True Story, Tahoma Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, Bayou, Baltimore Review, Crab Creek Review, The Normal School, Lunch Ticket, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Off the page, her literary art installations transform storytelling into experience. With A Novel Performance, Gabriela staged a month-long performance installation in Seattle’s Central Library that invited the public to watch via live monitor as she wrote a 70,000-word novel. With UGLY ME, Gabriela staged a multi-media spoken word installation that explored beauty through the medium of the selfie at Jack Straw Cultural Center’s New Media Gallery.
An advocate for public art and artists, Gabriela serves as an arts commissioner for the City of Burien, on 4Culture’s arts advisory committee, and as the creative nonfiction editor of Crab Creek Review.
