Forms of Care: Writing the Mortal Body
$360
In this generative writing class, we will explore meaning via the mortal body—the foundation of what it means to be human—as a fruitful landscape for creative reflection, risk-taking, and art making.
In each session, we will read and discuss a central text, write with in-class prompts, and share our freshly drafted words as a practice of self-care and care for each other. Writings from Victoria Chang, Alice Wong, Abi Palmer, Richard Siken, Elias Canetti, and Martha Silano will be our primary guides. This class offers opportunities for artistic expression and exploration related to health, disability, illness, grief, and life in a mortal body in a supportive learning environment.
We will read and discuss model texts and engage in generative exercises in class whose results can be further developed and revised at home. While this is not a critical workshop, there will be opportunities to share newly drafted work in class and support each other’s creativity through discussion and shared learning.
Course Goals:
• Explore the human condition through the lens of mortality, the body, health, self-care, and care for others.
• Deepen and expand our creative capacities for vulnerability, humor, tenderness, and grace.
• Create new writing about the body inspired by in-class prompts.
• Strengthen our powers of perception, curiosity, and inquiry through writing, reflection, and close observation.
• Expand our awareness of and connection to other living beings.
Course Schedule:
Week 1: The Shape of Change
When a loved one experiences ill health, everything changes: their life shifts and so do ours: our relationships, our home environment, ourselves. In this session, selections from Victoria Chang’s OBIT and Dear Memory will guide us in writing the shape of change, the grief that arises in response to it, and what is born on the other side.
Week 2: I Do Know Some Things
Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things invites readers to risk intimacy with mortality, disability, and care. Writing in the aftermath of a stroke, Siken confronts the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of literary form as he once did. We’ll take inspiration from Siken’s approach and write into the human condition with constraint, without ornament, and with tender clarity.
Week 3: Big Cat Energy
In Chinese culture, the tiger is deeply revered for its confidence, passion, ambition, and ferocity. A self-described disabled oracle and founder of the Disability Visibility Project, Alice Wong’s The Year of the Tiger opens a portal into the Underworld of the American healthcare system and a space for disabled people to be in conversation with one another and the world.
Week 4: Slug Manifesto
A lyric manifesto/memoir, Abi Palmer’s “Slugs: A Manifesto” considers how the politics of capitalism meet chronic illness, crip phenomenology, iridescent queerness, and shapeshifting, viscous ‘slug time.’ We will consider the manifesto as a literary form and embrace Palmer’s invitation to envision a future where humanity becomes just a little more sluglike.
Week 5: Against Death
The layered literary form called aufzeichnungen harmonizes the reader’s mind with the writer’s mind, thought by thought. It is a flexible form for essaying on vast topics, such death—and life. Excerpts from Elias Canetti’s The Book Against Death offer a model for lightly assembling our own complex and even conflicting philosophies about what it means to live and love and, eventually, to die.
Week 6: Surreal Terminality
When supporting a loved one through illness, we’re faced with the fact of our own inevitable physical decline and end: As poet Martha Silano reminds us, we’re all getting off at the same exit. It’s tempting to turn away, yet a study of death is a study of life: what we love and value and what we do with the time we have. Silano’s Terminal Surreal, published after her death, offers ideas for engaging compassionately, directly, and even playfully with these ideas.
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.
