I’m super excited to be running this series of workshops with Ruth Charnock in the fall. It brings together two of my favorite themes – writing and relating outside the lines. I’ve also been secretly desiring to work with the Beyond Form creative writing collective for years and am delighted that they’re offering this course.
Writing is inseparable from relationship. Yet there is surprisingly little written about how the dominant mode of intimate relating in modern/colonial life – compulsory monogamy (and its associated coloniality, patriarchy, heteronormativity, nationalism and capitalist labor) – influences how we write and what writing does and can do. There is even less written about this from an ecological or metabolic perspective in which non-monogamy is not just a name for certain kinds of human relationships but a practice of becoming response-able to our life-giving entanglements and queer commitments with both human and non-human kin.
We’re diving into these question by grafting non/monogamous sensibilities with experimental writing and embodiment practices across the months. Come along for the ride!
What’s this workshop about?
How can writing undo monogamous ways of thinking, being, doing and relating? How is our writing constrained by calcified and normative forms, fears and fantasies about what writing should be and where it should go? Who and what are tied down and twisted by human-only imaginaries, the ‘marriage plot,’ the imperative of prescribed genres, normative happy endings, boring kinds of climax, delusions of linear time, single stories, coherent characters, and the terror of loose ends? How can we write in ways that are more faithful to our already abundant, complex but often invisible and excluded relational ecologies?
In ‘Writing with Non-monogamy,’ we’ll write through more capacious forms of relationality than are afforded to us by grammars of compulsory monogamy. We’re interested in queer kinds of commitment and the affordances of different forms and practices for non-monogamous writing: graphomania’s passion for proliferation; queer etymology’s intimacy with plurality, subversive/subsumed/lost/forgotten/denied/minor meanings, animism’s more-than-human, earth-and-cosmos-based, nonbinary, relational grammar and participants, and the disruptive connections of erotic forces and flows.
Who is this for?
This workshop is for writers and creatives of all persuasions at all levels of experience. You don’t need to know anything about non/monogamy to participate and this is not a how-to course. All welcome!
Dates ǀ 5 sessions starting September 27th 2023 ǀ Wednesdays 6-8pm (BST) on Zoom
Session 1, September 27th – intro to writing with non-monogamy
This week, we’ll explore how compulsory monogamy sneaks into our writing, and write through more capacious forms of relationality and queerer kinds of commitment than are afforded to us by its grammars.
Session 2, October 4th – writing with erotic forces and flows
This week, we’ll deepen our practices of writing with non-monogamy by tuning in with the disrupting-connecting forces and flows of the erotic in its manifold forms.
Session 3, October 25th – writing with graphomania
This week is dedicated to graphomania’s passion for proliferation, palimpsests and promiscuity.
Session 4, November 22nd – writing with queer etymologies
This week, we will play with queer etymology; expanding imagination through linguistic plurality and the portals of subversive, subsumed, lost, forgotten, denied and minor meanings.
Session 5, December 6th – writing with more-than-human relations
This week we turn to writing with animism’s more-than-human, earth-and-cosmos-based, nonbinary, relational characters and grammar, and to the ecological response-abilities of non-monogamous writers.
Cost
full price – £150 for all or £30 per session
concession rate – £75 for all or £15 per session
2 free bursary places (with application)
Sarah Amsler 
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