Six-week online course taught via Zoom

Thursdays, February 13 to March 20, 2025 
7pm - 9pm EST (NYC Time)
$185 Paid Patreon Members / $195 General Admission

Please note: This class will NOT be recorded

“Prophecy is less an act of foretelling than confirmation,” the poet Joyelle McSweeney writes. “It is the past, not the future, that prophecy brings to light.” McSweeney’s occult ecopoetics, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults only becomes more prescient as past portents collide with our glitchy present—and multiply. 

In this generative writing class, McSweeney’s vivid, pulsing notion of the Necropastoral will guide our artmaking into spectral nextness and uncanny entanglement—an ectoplasmic examination of ecology, mortality, poetics, and landscape. Each session will explore biological principles such as mutation, proliferation, contamination, and decay as creative forces for writing. Our embodied experiences—for we are each, right now, living in the Necropastoral—will fuel experimental and unexpected new writing.

We’ll also explore works by Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Jane Wong, CA Conrad, and Maya Jewell Zeller, whose hybrid and haunted poetry, prose, and translation expose the modern-day roots of the Necropastoral’s tentacles.

What is the power of artmaking in decadent times? “It’s what Plato wants to put back in the bottle,” McSweeney says, “the pharmakon—the cure that harms, the poison that heals.” We’ll consume heady draughts of inspiration in each session, then brew our own literary elixirs.

In this class we will:

• Generate new writing inspired by Joyelle McSweeney’s The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults and works by other contemporary writers.

• Explore the multifaceted experience of embodied life in the Anthropocene, from birth to death as a creative source.

• Strengthen powers of perception, reflection, curiosity, imagination, and inquiry through creative writing.

• Expand awareness of and connection to other beings, living and dead.

• Discover the work of new writers and encourage and inspire each other as peers.

• Attendees will leave each session with new writing starts that can be developed further at home.

Weekly Themes:

Week 1: Welcome to the Necropastoral: We’ll attune our gaze to perceive the world anew through the lens of the Necropastoral—a political-aesthetic zone of exchange defined by proliferating activity, strange meetings, and uncanny channels—then we’ll seek it out where we live.

Week 2: Anachronism [Bug Time, Pig Time, Rat Time]: The deathly poetics of Kim Hyesoon will bring us snout-to-snout with the maternal and the bestial while McSweeney’s philosophy of Bug Time and Mommy Rats will inspire writing that snags, glitches, twitches, and scurries.

Week 3: Mutation & Metastasis: The spells of Maya Jewell Zeller offer models of lyric writing that cross-pollinate, mutate, proliferate, and deliciously infect. McSweeney’s punning earworms will open the door to otherworldly word play.

Week 4: Mirrors & Paradox: Doubles and mirroring in works by poet and translator Don Mee Choi and McSweeney reveal how identity and memory are anything but singular or linear. Selections from Choi’s KOR-US trilogy will inspire us to play with paradox, twinning, and multiple selves.

Week 5: Decay & Putrefaction: The dark fruits of Jane Wong’s poetics are steeped in sensual decomposition; her foods, moods, and bodies putrefy sweetly. With Wong as our guide, we’ll write into decay with encouragement from McSweeney, a self-proclaimed Decadent, who reminds us that even the grave is a fertile place.

Week 6: Death Styles: McSweeney’s newest book of poetry, Death Styles, will lead us into creative inquiry around death, loss, grief—and the spells we unwittingly cast from within this powerful threshold. CA Conrad’s imaginative (Soma)tic poetry rituals will inspire us to embrace our hybrid, chimeric world.

No prerequisite knowledge or skills needed to participate in this class, except for a curious mind and a willingness to experiment with writing and ideas. Attendees are invited to respond to prompts in whatever modality or genre they wish.

Each week, the class will receive a detailed weekly recap, ideas for continuing in-class work, and related enrichments from the literary world and beyond. In an effort to nurture real-time creative engagement and community-building amongst attendees, this course will not be recorded.

Your guide through this world is writer, editor, and transdisciplinary artist Gabriela Denise Frank, a friend of Morbid Anatomy who hails from the Pacific Northwest. Trained in visual design, music, religious studies, and writing, she is driven to help other artists embrace the hybrid, the strange, and the imaginative in their work—and feel the power in making weird, wonderful shit that can’t be easily categorized.

Images: Frolicking skeletons, Kawanabe Kyosai, 19th century