Haunted and Hybrid: Exploring Occult Ecopoetics
$340
In this generative writing class, poet Joyelle McSweeney’s vivid notion of the Necropastoral will guide us into creative engagement with environmental writing, mortality, spells, and unconventional poetics.
Biological principles such as mutation, contamination, and decay are transformed into artistic forces in works by McSweeney, Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Jane Wong, CAConrad, and Maya Jewell Zeller. Their hybrid and haunted poetry and prose will help us explore the paradoxic beauty and harm of climate change, species loss, eco grief, and environmental disruption.
What is the power of poetry in decadent times? “It’s what Plato wants to put back in the bottle,” McSweeney says, “the pharmakon—the cure that harms, the poison that heals.” We’ll consume heady draughts of inspiration from readings and discussions, then brew our own unexpected literary elixirs.
Access Program
We want our writing classes and seminars 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.
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.
