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Extra/Ordinary: Writing the Uncommon in the Everyday
$360
Close reading is a practice of attention: an antidote to speed and frictionless swipability. It helps us appreciate literature more deeply and shapes us into more deft practitioners of craft. Paisley Rekdal notes, “When we take the same critical care with our own writing that we take with published poems, we are bound not only to see the patterns behind our failings, but (more important) new and more adventurous paths open up in the ways we represent our worlds.”
In this generative class we will close-read—and write—alongside works that resist easy classification, including “Everyday Barf” by Eileen Myles, “Dead Doe” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “Exhausting a Place in Paris” by Georges Perec, Christina Sharpe’s “The Shapes of Grief,” and Rekdal’s “Nightingale: A Gloss.” Writers will come away with sharpened tools of observation, tactile craft practices, a portfolio of fresh writing starts, and a keener sense of the uncommon and the poetic within the everyday—on and off the page.
Access Program
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.
