Over the past few months of quarantine, we have seen an unprecedented engagement with public health through digital means, moments of both great isolation and new opportunities for connection, and radical acts of mutual aid and visibility of need. In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to reflect on their own unique experience of this time, and how it might support them in connecting to broader narratives about vulnerability, privilege and how direct engagement with precarity and embodiment might move us toward new understandings of our surroundings and support systems.
This two-part creative writing workshop, led by writer
Leora Fridman, draws on existing texts from contemporary writers on the differently-abled and ill body, in order to consider and write into our own reckonings with care and fragility. In each of the two workshop sessions we will read together, discuss, and have several guided writing periods. The two sessions will build on one another, but if you're not able to attend both, you'll still be able to fully participate. Our inspirations will include
Romily Alice Walden’s
Primer on Working With Disabled Group Members,
Mia Mingus’
access intimacy, the
Sickness Affinity Group’s
Fatigued Compassionate Oracle, and
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s visions for utopian care. Participants should come ready to experiment and try on new techniques. All are welcome, with or without former experience in creative writing
These workshops will take place over Zoom. Registration is required and the group will be capped at 30 attendees -
please use this link to register.
Leora Fridman is a writer whose work is concerned with issues of identity, assimilation, care, ability, and embodiment. She's the author of
My Fault, selected by Eileen Myles for the Cleveland State University Press First Book Prize, in addition to other books of prose, poetry and translation. Her work appears or is forthcoming in
the Millions, the
New York Times,
The Rumpus, Tricycle Magazine, and
Triangle House, among others. Leora holds degrees with honors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers and Brown University. She has taught online and in person in universities, homes and community organizations, and collaborates widely with artists, writers and organizations. In 2020-2021 she will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Nonfiction at Saint Lawrence University.
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