I'm excited to teach a graduate class this quarter. Western Washington University has a new MFA program in Creative Writing with an emphasis on hybrid genres.
My work blurs boundaries because I find pleasure in movement, in change, in mutability. If I believed in a god, it would take the form of an animal, and its name would be Imagination. What a gift to be able to fantasize, invent, daydream. There's nothing childish about this play, nothing conventional about this pleasure. Imagination is the ultimate threat to authority. It's the basis of activism, social change, art, and love.
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English 506: Multigenre Writing
Genre and the Queer Imagination
In this writing workshop, we'll read and imitate texts by contemporary American queer writers whose work challenges assimilationist paradigms of GLBT identity. Our starting point will be The Gentrification of the Mind, Sarah Schulman's nonfiction account of the gentrification of the queer imagination. Literary texts include Cool for You (Eileen Myles), Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic (Eva Heisler), The Rest of Love (Carl Phillips), and The Spectral Wilderness (Oliver Bendorf). Students will write short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry pieces for weekly workshops. The final project will be a collection of hybrid pieces organized into a chapbook or single long piece.
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