Oulipo: Generative Experiments in Constrained Writing
$340
Formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, the members of Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle ~ Workshop for Potential Literature) found inspiration at the intersection of creative constraints and the freedom to break form. This course is a guide to the spirit and ethos of Oulipo and their collaborative experimental writing approach, designed to free the mind through constraint.
As a collective, we will drink mightily from Oulipo’s seriously playful postures and endless outcomes to create the strange, the uncanny, and the inspired. Together we will become, as Queneau described, “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”
Each session will offer generative prompts and experimental forms for writers to respond to. Attendees will leave this hands-on course with a portfolio of new starts that include lipograms, S+7, palindromes, snowballs, contrapuntals, and more. No prior knowledge or skills required other than a sense of curiosity and a desire to test, try, and experiment with writing.
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.
