Imagined Archives
Tuesdays, Jan 20 - Feb 24, 5-7pm PST

Why make imaginary archives? 

cost: $300, $400, or $500 (sliding scale, you decide)

one free spot available. see this page for more details.

The archive is inaccessible. Its walls tower. It’s razed to the ground by invading forces, torched to erase memory. The archive whispers in the breeze. It’s deleted, censored, glitched and erased. It releases its memos and treasures bit by bit, slowly, to those who know how to ask. Given the wide range of perils facing the archive, it’s a wonder anything is saved for future generations. Some writers have experimented with the possibilities of the archive by creating their own fictional archives. Some create entirely imagined interviews with future revolutionaries. Some have their characters uncover the archeological remains of our present-day society, or the bones of an unusual species that never existed. Still others imagine stories connected to real objects and letters and people, taking liberties with the past. What this shows us is that archives live ahead of as well as behind us. They are living collections, and can offer us a speculative exercise that can open up narrative and political possibilities for those without archives of their own. Is an imagined archive playground, pastiche, or possibility? What happens when all three collide? And should we try making our own imagined archives? (We will.)

Readings will pull from the following books, as well as one-off short stories and essays provided in PDF form:

Odete, The Elder Femme and Other Stone Writings

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive

M.E. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072

Untold Microcosms: Latin American Writers in the British Museum

Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature of the Americas

Enroll in Imagined Archives here.

No Future
Tuesdays, March 10 - April 14, 5-7pm PST

On writing characters who cannot imagine a future.

cost: $300, $400, or $500 (sliding scale, you decide)

one free spot available. see this page for more details.

A fundamental tenet of this class is that characters who cannot imagine a future for themselves deserve to be fully imagined people on the page. Regardless of how they arrived in this position—whether through trauma, depression, alienation from loved ones or political imprisonment—the question of how to write without a future is one that can animate our writing through careful analysis. Are these characters without hope? How do we write suicide without judgment? Is a depressed character unlikeable? Does it matter? Does the inability to imagine a future mark one out as a pariah, a martyr, sick and in need of fixing? Does it signify some deeper unknowable truth about the world? Or is it simply another facet of being a human being in a time of increased fascism, paranoia, and violence? We will become comfortable discussing death and despair, something mainstream American society would rather ignore. We will resist the last minute saccharine turn toward hope for someone without a future, but we will also stay open to reversals, reprieve, and revelation that can come about from embracing the whole person on the page, in a time of desperation. 

Please note that while we will do occasional writing prompts both in and outside of class, this is not a workshop. Students are invited to participate in a biweekly cowrite & chat session on alternating Thursdays, and will have the opportunity to schedule one-on-one sessions with me (Cal). Given the subject of this class, students should be prepared to confront difficult and potentially triggering material. You are always welcome to step away, sign out, turn your camera off, or recuse yourself from a specific class. Strategies will be shared for how to care for ourselves when reading & writing about trauma, suicide, and more. 

Readings will pull from the following books, as well as one-off short stories and essays provided in PDF form:

Vi Khi Nao, Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche

Rykki Ducornet, The Plotinus

John Edgar Wideman, Writing to Save a Life

Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories

Nate Lippens, My Dead Book

Enroll in No Future here.