Registration is rolling until July 6 at 11:59PM EST. No application is required (except for financial aid— Applications for financial aid are due July 1 at 5PM EST).
$400 w/financial aid available to residents of Greater Philadelphia (Bucks, Camden, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties)
8 week class: Tuesdays 6-8PM EST, 7/11, 7/18, 7/25, 8/1, 8/8, 8/15, 8/22, 8/29 (with optional make up date on 9/5)
In this fiction writing workshop, we will try to transcend our reading and writing preferences to be apprenticed by visceral, avant-garde literature and one film—aesthetic achievements centered around objective life, subjective reality, and ecstatic confession! Most of the works that affect us deeply are the ones that might have wearied us or even greatly disturbed us. But in time, upon further reflection, we find them rather informative—or even illuminating! We will write new weekly writing and discuss the weekly reading (and one film). You will challenge your self-censorship in a safe and supportive environment and read weekly what you write to develop your observational and listening skills in determining the effects of the spoken word. The books and the film we will be studying may challenge you aesthetically and emotionally, so you will be encouraged to experiment, to write aesthetically and emotionally––you will emote!
We will not be analyzing the plot or the symbolism of a work per se, but looking at its aesthetic quality, pondering how it was created as writers ourselves, not as literary critics. Your main goal is to learn from them, to be apprenticed by them, and to practice, apply, and play around with some of what you learn from them in your creative writing. You will be in a supportive space, so don’t be afraid to open up. Vulnerability is strength. All great art comes from it.
Marc Anthony Richardson is the author of Messiahs and Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award and a Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. His forthcoming novel, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, won a Creative Capital Award and a Sachs Program Grant for Arts Innovation. He also received grants or residencies from PEN America, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Art Omi, and the Vermont Studio Center. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, and the anthology, Who Will Speak for America? In 2022, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Scholar-in-Residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.