About:
Are you looking to write write write this summer?
Are you looking to aliven an existing project?
Are you looking to build something completely new?
Are you looking to find a *writing community*?
Join Lucas Baisch and Imani Elizabeth Jackson for Slug School: a summer series of multi-genre writing workshops (virtual +). Registration for each class will be limited to 10 participants.
At the end of each workshop, we will create a risograph-printed reader compiled from the class’ new work.
Who are these courses for? Any writer writing (we have a commitment to genre agnosticism - all text forms welcome). Any artists and/or thinkers without a writing practice who are wishing to build one. Anyone interested in lateral learning models. Anyone with a collaborative and curious spirit.
Sliding Scale: $150-350 for five week courses; $70-140 for two week courses.
Courses:
Hydropoetics: writing with water
(with Imani Elizabeth Jackson, 5 weeks, virtual)
Tuesdays, 6-8:30pm CT, 7/2 - 7/30Etymologically, hydrography means water writing. As a science, hydrography concerns itself with measuring, surveying, and describing large bodies of water—oceans, rivers, lakes— especially for the purpose of safe navigation. Together we will consider ourselves as literary hydrographers, surveying a number of hydroscapes and returning the word to its parts. We will think, read, experience, and write about water in many dimensions and scales: the personal, social, political, and ecological among them. And rather than writing strictly about waters as if they are solely outside of ourselves per se, we will attempt to write with and as water, as watery bodies.
FULL!
Trash as Language / Language as Trash
(with Lucas Baisch, 5 weeks, virtual)
Wednesdays, 6-8:30pm CT, 7/3 - 7/31Think of a class as a garbage compendium, where inorganic strata indicate a record of life and spitting into a gutter functions as literary pursuit. This course will introduce waste and excess as motifs to write toward. We will examine several spectra offered by the field of Discard Studies: worth versus worthlessness, durability versus fragility, the nutritious versus the toxic, and the discreet versus the hypervisible. Topics explored may include the use of recycled/sorted language, the “junkyness” of the written word, methods of self-contamination, abjection, and materialist study. As a writerly community we will push ourselves to ask: how do we make mess and how do we clean it up?
FULL!
Listening for palimpsests
(with Imani Elizabeth Jackson, 5 weeks, virtual)
Tuesdays, 6-8:30pm CT, 8/6 - 9/3Let’s wander our way through writing processes that rely on prior texts, images, sounds, and other works as their basis for creation. We will discuss the techniques and other concerns while developing our own set of intertextual strategies, using Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice as a guide for our inquiry. Among the questions we will work at together are the following: what does one read for when encountering a text? What does one read for as a reader and what does one read for as a writer? What does one, as a new interlocutor with a piece of writing or piece of art, make of it and how does one make something further from it, moving the text and making a new relationship with it and with it?
Tricksters, Mischief, Lit.
(with Lucas Baisch, 5 weeks, virtual)
Wednesdays, 6-8:30pm CT, 8/7 - 9/4From mythology to contemporary media, the trickster has surfaced across narrative arts welcoming deviance/formal transgression as a plot device, a political reinforcement, a measure of identity, a tool for invention. Launching from Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World, this course will task students with writing exercises prompted by speed, theft, gluttony, humor, the charismatic, the polytropic, the crossing of the threshold, and acts of obfuscation. Beyond a base of folklore / mythology, texts investigated may include work by Italo Calvino, MarĂa Irene FornĂ©s, Kathy Acker, Fred Moten, Christopher Chen, and Ben Lerner, amongst others.
WALKING AND TALKING
(with Imani Elizabeth Jackson, 2 weeks, in person)
Sundays, 2-4:30pm CT, 8/11 & 8/18How does walking influence the rhythms of our speech, and how can we translate this from plain speech to poetic text? To what degree is an ambulatory poetics informed by the environments in which walking occurs? What are the political and social ramifications of such practices? This two session workshop will take place in two environments—the street and the beach. Together we will read and talk about excerpted works by David Antin, Harryette Mullen, Christian Schlegel, Guy Debord, and others while also conducting our own ambulatory experiments.
Enroll:
Your seat in each course is reserved through your Venmo deposit. Alongside payment, please send your name, email and a brief (1-2 sentence) note on why you’d like to take this class (lucas.r.baisch@gmail.com or imaniejxn@gmail.com). You can put this in the notes field. As an addendum on payment, all classes are sliding scale with the lower end intended for participants of color and/or low-income people regardless of race. We trust you as participants to pay as you are able to within this scale.
If costs are prohibitive, please email us and we can work something out. If you would like to sponsor someone else taking the course, please indicate that in the notes field. Thank you!