LIVE – SYNCHRONOUS

If we are all telling the same stories of love and sex and death, how can we write something new? And with so much of our lives spent online, how can we keep from writing disembodied, flat lines? The answer might not lie in writing about something completely different (if that’s even possible) or in shocking your readers awake, but rather in reconnecting to your senses, practicing the discipline of awareness, learning how to notice again things you know intimately well, so much so that perhaps you don’t even notice them at all anymore. Ostranenie, a Russian term used in literature to talk about defamiliarization, is defined as “the technique of forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar.” As such, this course is an investigation into this, and we’ll exercise a deep practice of awareness, using attention as a form of devotion—a raw, muscular kind of seeking and an unflinching dedication to scrubbing away one’s preconceived notions of a thing in order to see it for what it really is. This five-day intensive taught live online is intended to challenge, and through a combination of generative exercises, daily feedback, and close readings of poets including Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and many others, it’s my hope that as a group we’ll stitch ourselves back to our animal bodies and return to our senses in more ways than one.

LIVE TIME: 12am-2pm (Eastern Time) daily.