6-week online class
Dates: Sundays, January 8 - February 12, 2023
Time: 6 - 8 pm New York EDT
Admission: $175 Patreon Members/$185 General Admission

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time, but it is highly recommended you attend the classes live for the richest experience.

The blank page can be a lonely place to start, and the conventions of narrative prose too predictable. Some stories yearn for a spark, a key, a passcode—an incantation—before their magic can be set free.

Formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, the members of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle ~ Workshop for Potential Literature) found inspiration at the intersection of creative constraints and the total freedom to break form. This course offers generative writing exercises designed to free the mind and creative spirit so that we may birth new and unexpected beasts.

Through readings, class discussions, and in-class generative writing prompts we’ll explore how a combination of Oulipian constraints, hybrid forms, and a spirit of experimentation can release the ghosts bottled within us. You will leave this hands-on course with a number of new drafts that include hybrid texts, visual stories, ekphrastic writing, erasure and “found” texts, concrete poems, and constraint essays. We’ll write a lot.

As a collective, we will drink mightily from the Oulipian spirit of playful postures and endless outcomes to create the strange, the haunted, the inspired. We will inhabit new structures and patterns, which writers may shape and develop in any way they enjoy. Together we will become, as Oulipo founder Raymond Queneau described, “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”

For writers who wish to publish their work, we will discuss how to prepare pieces to send out and which journals are looking for hybrid and experimental pieces.

COURSE ACTIVITIES

• In-class writing exercises offer a range of productive constraints for writers to respond to creatively. Writers will be encouraged to follow their individual obsessions and interests in subject matter, and to write in whatever modality they wish.

• Journaling with words, images, ink, and mixed media collage

• Reading and discussing inspirational works as models

• Relating personal interests and experience to cultural, historic, scientific, and artistic phenomena, thereby placing the self in context with the larger world

• Generating visual and textual artifacts to reconnect with the power and joy of making.

• Focus on accessing wellsprings of creativity and imagination, clearing blocks, experimentation and play, developing confidence, and taking artistic risks.

• Recommendations on journals that publish individual hybrid or experimental work, and advice on creating a chapbook portfolio of pieces generated from the class.

• Sharing the work we create with each other and building creative community

Your guide through this world is writer, editor, and transdisciplinary storyteller Gabriela Denise Frank, a friend of Morbid Anatomy who hails from the Pacific Northwest. Trained in visual design, music, religious studies, and writing, something magic happened in Gabriela’s creative practice when she began to break the boundaries of genre and form. A devout student of all that constraints have to teach, she is determined 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.

The only qualifications for this course are a curious mind, the urge to experiment with writing, and the desire to create new work. Writers are free to work in any modality they choose (poetry, prose, a combination) and draw on skills in visual art and/or any other productive medium.