Send your drafts to the group via email by the due date on the calendar. We’ll have 45 – 50 minutes for workshops, so we’ll have time to look closely, read passages aloud, talk about the big picture and specific details.

As you read, consider–and make notes–about the following:

• What is the situation? What’s the story? Could the story use refinining?
• Is the angle focused enough? Is it interesting? Did it make you think? How might it be sharpened?
• Structure: How would you describe it? Can you identify a moment when the structure takes a turn? Do you have any suggestions for restructuring?
• Characters: Are they compelling? Do they develop? Can you identify a moment that makes you think about a character in a new way?
• Language that stands out as particularly successful.
• Moments when you were confused or bored.
• Details you want to learn more about.
• First and last sentences: Does the opening sentence make you want to keep reading? Why or why not? Does the closing sentence make you want to keep thinking about the topic? Does it “land.” Does it provide closure or some kind of new opening? Does it offer a twist? Does it continue a significant thread in the piece and do something new with it?

In class:

• The writers will start us off by telling us what kind of feedback they want. One writer might want a set of targeted responses, help with very specific elements–for example, transitions; precision with verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; introductions and conclusions; sentence patterns; structure; description, analysis, or exposition. Another writer might want help with the concept or argument of the piece. Still another might want to hear unfiltered feedback–what’s working best and what needs work.
• Then each of the readers will name one of the piece’s main strengths–and give the writer an opportunity to respond or ask questions.
• After that, we’ll offer the kind of feedback the writer has asked for.
• Then we’ll have time for people to offer any feedback that hasn’t been articulated.
• Finally, as a group, we’ll make a list of tasks for revision.

After class:

• Send written feedback to each writer, based on your reading and the workshop description by the Sunday after that week’s session.

As you read, Abdurraqib’s “The Josephine Baker Monument Can Never Be Big Enough” (great title!), consider the prompts below. Baker was a real person who created a strong public persona. As Abdurraqib writes about her, he builds on these to create her character.

For class choose two sentences or passages to discuss below: 1. A moment when Abdurraqib uses a technique, or techniques, suggested by the prompts below to build his Josephine Baker character, and 2. A moment when Abdurraqib gives us a sense of his character as narrator.

Then, think about the prompts in relation to your own writing. What characters are you building? How will you make them memorable? We’ll work on character building in class. You won’t use all of these prompts so pick and choose, but consider at least five in advance. Your answers may not end up in the piece, but they will help you think about character development.

• Describe your character’s body language, with an eye toward to what it suggests about what may be unspoken.
• Describe your character’s speech patterns–or show them with some dialogue.
• Where was your character born? Where did your character grow up.
• Describe your character’s childhood home and current home.
• What’s strange or unique about your character?
• What might your character have in common with a lot of readers?
• Describe how a stranger perceives your character on a first encounter.
• Describe what people who .know your character say to each other about the character in general or a predicament the character faces.
• What does your character like to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner–and at what times?
• What are your character’s sleeping patterns?
• Describe some historical or cultural context that will give readers a sense of where a character fits in the world.
• What does your character keep secret? What does your character reveal?
• What was or is your character as a little kid? And in high school?
• Describe a moment that changed your character’s mind or life.
• What’s your character’s profession? Does your character enjoy that profession? Does your character have a side gig or dream in addition to the job?
• Describe what your character does to relax.
• What are some major relationships in your character’s life? Which ones matter to the story you’re telling? Which ones define your character’s sense of self?
• Describe your character’s feelings about sex and sexuality.
• Confront your character with a person in authority–a parent, doctor, detective, lawyer, politician, boss. Describe how the character responds.
• Has your character experienced significant loss?
• Describe what your character wants most. What will it take to get it, if getting it is possible.
• If you met this character at a party, what would the interaction be like?

Our reading for next week is a series of short texts from The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language. The idea of the anthology is that it collects texts that changed or invigorated American English—so very much in keeping with our conversation last week.

To prepare, Ask ChatGPT to give you a detailed history of etymology of a word or phrase that’s significant for your project for this course; then ask Google Bard to do the same; then just Google “etymology of hip hop” or whatever the word or phrase is. Bring all these to class.

We’ll do a hands-on, generative workshop from there.

Example of an Associational Nonsense Writing Warm-Up

tease teaser teased eased erased based biased biasing singsingsingsingsong gong bangagong alongalongalong analog offline albums needles gridless girdle bird gridlessgirdlebirg song analogsong deathofautotune offline online seesaw see saw see saw seeing being travesty generating code mashup rearrange derange code lode erode restore storage storing words in storage rearrange left lane do-it-yourself code-it sew sow see sew see sow see sowing seeds of love tears for fears source text unconscious mind unconscious internet unconscious collective undoing unfolding underneath underwear tear tears cry cry cry don’t cry don’t say don’t cry lie sigh bribe bridle unbridle de-bridle brindle brindle brindle rescind mix and blend risk and send say it say it say it don’t say it unsay it re-say it play it like a record analog analogy analogize apologize reorganize disorganize size eyes size of eyes wide eyes sensaround sense sensory senstiivity senses on defense senses on offense size of eyes confirm or deny lie lay lain laid lied dyed died color recolor decolor color code.

• For five minutes, try out a an associational nonsense warm-up.
• Open ChatGPT: Type in a sentence or two from your own work
  • Ask ChatGPT to rearrange the words, even if they’re nonsensical
  • Ask the bot to give you five variations on the sentence
  • Prompt it to create repetition
  • Choose a variation and, again, ask it to put the words in a new order and then give you five variations.
  • Do this same activity with another sentence or two.
• Write down any words or phrases you find interesting from what you’ve generated so far. Then, take those words and use them to write a sentence or sentences.
• Take a look at the paragraph you took your original sentence from. How might you revise or reimagine it based on the experimenting you’ve just done.

I’m writing a memoir which is turning into a piece that includes more about my mother than I thought it would, and a bit about the history of homes for unwed mothers in mid-century , Manchester, England where. my mother was born.

This writing is a journey of self and family discovery. It will provide some history for my posterity. Also, my story and my mother’s will be an encouragement to others and remind them that you can overcome various types of challenges even multi-layered ones.

The style is continuing to unfold. I use various voices; first, second, and third person to help me look back in a way that feels like I can see better, from a different perspective.

Maya Angelo’s auto-bio of her early life was one of the first books to make me think I wanted to write a bio too. Roxane Gay’s use of chapters is a model for me. I like the subtleness of Frederick Buechner. Maxine Hong Kingston has a way of interweaving the spiritual that I think works well. I see these and other authors doing things that I had been experimenting with, but they do it artfully.

I have been using AI for background information, and research and found it amazingly helpful on several occasions. Revising and editing by submitting a whole paragraph or short story has yielded some good nuggets too. I will continue to use it this way and may discover more ways to make use of this tool along the way,

What do I want to write about….

I’ve always wanted to write about how people who don’t deserve to get hurt, get hurt. This comes in many forms, like discrimination based on race, class, ethnicity, whatever. 

But much of it comes down to luck too, such as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, so I don’t know where I’d be going with this. After all, I’m not equipped enough to tell people what they should or shouldn’t do, or how they should treat some people and not others. 

I can’t be a paragon of virtue. I can only state my insanely biased worldview, instilled with an asinine sense of justice like I’m still a kid playing make-believe in middle school. But with my current writing abilities, I want to be able to write a piece that instills hope and stirs people to action, if only fictitiously. In that sense, I want to mimic the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, whose fictional scenarios feel compelling enough to shake the wills of even the laziest elites. 

I don’t concretely know what it is that I’m trying to write yet. I learned a lot about the different types of form from our classes, and as of late I’ve been invited to look back upon literature which I read previously.

I finished playing a video game I enjoyed lately. Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. In this photorealistic flight simulator game, you play as a pilot in the midst of a world war. You follow orders to the letter, and in doing so you get into a lot of trouble, but it all works out in the end. At the war’s climax, the conflicting nations band together to launch an attack on the greatest threat to their survival yet: mass-produced AI flight drones. Everything works out in the end so long as you follow orders, and shoot what you’re told to shoot. It’s all very cliched: humans good, AI bad, even though humanity’s malice is what led to the advent of drone warfare to begin with. But it works and leaves the player extremely satisfied with both the experience of combat and the knowledge that you are the pilot who has saved the world and has earned to right to fly into the dark blue skies of peace. As the protagonist, just by following orders and holding down the trigger, you earn the right the save the world. 

Before the semester started, I worked on fixing previous writings and assignments. Polishing and adding on to those writings in different forms made me realize there are so many ways to connect to readers that I hadn’t realized. Use of words, expressions, the smallest extra detail can enhance any type of paper. As of late I’ve been using ChatGTP and studying the little details that it adds that make us tilt our head back in shock. Last week’s class during our hour of using Ai, I noticed some random additions it would make. Most of them were not needed, but as I was reading the additions, some of them made me nod in approval. Thinking to myself how did I not think of that? Analyzing the small things it does that bring a writing more to life. There isn’t a paper or an assignment that i’m currently working on at the moment. Yet knowing myself as the semester continues there will be and in preparation for those future projects, I know my writing needs more polishing. As someone who writes and enjoys it, I would like to learn more of those small things, those enhancements that make writings pop and reel in a reader to seek more. Using Ai has slowly helped me further that goal and get much better.

I have two essays I’m working on this fall, both for my thesis, and then my book. They’re interconnected—one may be the opening of the thesis and one will close it. I’ve toggled between working on both in this class and I’m unsure of where I’ll land. The first essay is about a BDSM dynamic I was involved in while I was in my early 20s and newly sober. The second one is about a sober women’s meditation retreat I went on a few months ago. I’m going to try answering for both and see what pull is stronger.

Why does the subject matter to you?

The underlying theme of both is agency and beliefs in one’s self and inherent worth. In extension, the struggle to have one’s harder feelings (or truths) be seen and witnessed. The past ten years of sobriety (and what precluded it) have been such a period of growing up and learning to feel. It wasn’t until I had a leather belt taken to my back that I really started to express my grief. Before then, I drank or wrote songs in secret. I expressed vulnerability from a boundaried distance (a stage, a clearly defined kink dynamic, a recovery meeting, an emotionally unavailable beau).

The central idea of the kink essay is that I had to consciously participate in my own sublimation in order to begin undoing it. By the time we get to the recovery meeting when I’m 36, I’m in a totally different place, but my life is sort of in freefall. Still, I am way more agenic, with a stronger (albeit wobbly) sense of self. They are definitely two different stories. Anyway, I’m interested in setting up those polar narratives to see what happens.

In writing this, I’m realizing that over the course of the two essays I go from idolizing (distant) male dominant figures to finding deep connections with older women. The former gave me the illusion of control, the latter encouraged me to turn it over and find peace with everything that was beyond it. There might be something there.

Why might it matter to others?

These stories are about pain. Physical, relational. I think anyone who has been involved in a kink (or taboo) relationships will find the BDSM stories relatable—and certainly anyone who has used pain to process emotion.

The recovery story, probably other women who are later in sobriety and struggling to find their footing will see themselves in it. I’ve been surprised by how many women related to my stories about kink, period.

We all just want someone to tell us everything will be okay.

Do you have a sense of the style or voice you want to write in?

I’m working on long, pressured sentences for one of the most intense impact scenes and looking to Garth Greenwell. Kelly McMasters does such a wonderful job of setting a scene, so I’m looking to her for inspiration for describing the landscape in the sober retreat essay.

Maggie Nelson also writes about her own experiences in such a frank way, I’d love to emulate her. And finally, for quippy and sharp character introductions (since the retreat will have a few of them) I’m looking to CJ Hauser’s “The Crane Wife”.

How might AI help you with the project?

I’ve asked AI for guidance on an outline for the sober retreat essay. For the BDSM essay it keeps cutting me off, so I’ve just used it as a thesaurus. Overall, I will keep using it as a thesaurus and perhaps to play with my narrative structure.

The sober retreat essay may end up being a woven essay juxtaposed against the 5 Buddhist Bardos (from the Tibetan Book of the Dead). If so, I’ll use AI to break them down since I don’t have a ton of time for outside research until the Spring.

As I was mentioning at the beginning of the semester, I was really struggling with writer’s block. But last week, during class, I was able to finally able to write and get my ideas flowing. I think the idea of the “situation” and the “story” made me think a lot deeper about something that I wanted to write about a while ago–a fire that broke out in my apartment building last year. I found that maybe the reason I couldn’t write about this before was because I was too fixated on the actual situation (and admittedly, was not particularly inspired to write about it until now). But I think there is something more to the story. I am interested in the intersection of identity and anxiety, especially in the aftermath of how this day affected me. My standard creative non-fiction voice tends to be a bit more dreamlike (I fall into a pattern of masking my emotion with metaphor & descriptions of the unconscious. After all, it is sometimes your unconscious that gives insight into your conscious). However, I think this story calls for my vividness (with still, some dreamlike sequences). I was thinking of even creating somewhat of a braided essay, and maybe telling the story of something else (though I don’t know what). I am not sure how I am going to use AI yet, admittedly. Last week, I found myself resisting the predicable endings ChatGPT was creating for me. My writing was an act of resistance. But perhaps, this is how I will start using ChatGPT–resisting it’s every word and thought. And then, over time, maybe it will teach me something.

I’ve been trying to find an in on writing about motherhood in non-canned/non-conventional way that doesn’t just sound like the millions of other stories, fiction and non-fiction, that are already out there. I’m particularly interested in the intersection of motherhood, queerness, desire and loneliness. The failure of commonly held wisdoms and guidance surrounding the pregnant body and the post-partum body. I’ve done a lot of research this last year for my fiction project about the placenta. I’ve been struck by how it remains so mysterious in both science and culture. In terms of AI, I’ve been thinking about where motherhood and AI can overlap. I mean, AI certainly can’t breasteed your baby but what does that frontier look like? Can AI help us move beyond the heternormative reign of What to Expect? What’s the dark side here? I found myself asking ChatGPT a lot of questions in my son’s first year that I could have asked Google but maybe I was looking for some sort of connection while in the lonely throws of sleeplessness and second guessing myself. I’ve recently really enjoyed the hybridity and perspective of Shelia Heti’s Motherhood and Louisa’s Hall’s Reproduction. Both works are somehow very intimate/ and also quite clinical/removed from the subject matter– a hard balance to stike when writing about motherhood.