RQ Presents “Writing Boot Camp” with Jan Becker
DATE: JANUARY 19TH & 20TH, 2019 from 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM
LOCATION: THE LIGHT BOX @ GOLDMAN WAREHOUSE @ 404 NW 26TH ST, MIAMI, FL 33127. Map here.
COST: FREE. Donations appreciated. Donate here.
DESCRIPTION: The source text for this year’s Boot Camp will consist of poems from Reading Queer’s debut anthology Reading Queer: Poetry In A Time of Chaos (Anhinga Press, 2018).
Lace up your combat boots; we’re recruiting for an army of fierce writers. “BOOT CAMP FOR QUEER WRITERS” with Jan Becker is an intensive, prompt-driven poetry and flash nonfiction workshop. The term ‘boot camp’ may sound intimidating, but the only real order is, “permission to write freely.” This workshop is designed to liberate writers from their individual closets and get their words down on the page. The fast-paced writing drills disengage writers from that nagging, negative voice that plagues and prevents us from accessing what poet Maria Mazziotti-Gillan calls “the wise person who lives within our bellies.” Join us for the fourth iteration of what has proven to be a productive, empowering experience for writers from beginning level to published.
DISCLAIMER: Participants are free to attend both dates or either one.
Check out our 2018 – 2019 Writing Academy page for more information.
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DATE: FEBRUARY 2ND, 2019 from 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM
LOCATION: ALASKA COFFEE ROASTING @ 13130 BISCAYNE BLVD, NORTH MIAMI, FL 33181. Map here.
COST: ALWAYS FREE. Donations appreciated. Donate here
Memories can be tender, funny, somber, or sometimes too saturated with color to be properly captured through the traditional memoir. Reading Queer’s “Writing the Surreal Memoir” with Julie Marie Wade examines our relationship with memory, and guides writers to “queerify” their memoir by incorporating multi-genre fictional qualities that all the more so express authentic emotional truth. Participants may learn to liberate themselves from personal creative regulations, refreshingly revisit their past, and fiercingly create memoirs that are recognizably theirs. Please join Reading Queer and Julie Marie Wade for an afternoon of writing, with a coffee in hand, at the Alaska Coffee Roasting shop.
Alaska Coffee Roasting supports Reading Queer; Please support Alaska Coffee Roasting by purchasing a cup of coffee or more at this event.
DESCRIPTION: In recent years, surreal or speculative memoir has emerged as a fascinating sub-genre of creative nonfiction. Many writers working in the self-referential arts have realized they are just as interested in writing what might have happened, what may have happened, as they are in what most certainly did. In this workshop, we’ll read short-form examples from contemporary writers engaging the subjunctive to explore what if? aspects of their lives and use these texts as templates for our own written emulations. You can expect opportunities to read, write, share, and write again in response to works like Anne Panning’s “Remembering, I Was Not There,” Paisley Rekdal’s “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee,” Patricia Smith’s “Pearl, Upward,” and Bernard Cooper’s “Where to Begin.”
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JULIE MARIE WADE is the author of ten collections of poetry and prose, including Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2018) and The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, she teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus.