Class Description
Welcome to GrubStreet's Contemporary Craft Series, in which we bring you low cost opportunities to learn from some of the most influential voices in contemporary literature. More seminars in the series will become available throughout the year – subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to know when new authors will be teaching with us. Please note that sessions will not be recorded.
In his “A Year with Swollen Appendices,” Brian Eno talks about experiencing the crack in a blues singer’s voice or the static of a grainy film as being “the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” If we accept as American writers that our medium, the English language, is one of the deadliest colonial weapons ever invented, then its breaking becomes a political urgency.
In this Contemporary Craft seminar with Kaveh Akbar (Martyr!), participants will engage with the question of how we undermine our language’s inherent corrosiveness, and turn a violent technology against itself to speak to things—doubt, sex, identity, justice, rage—it would rather us leave unspoken. This lecture will discuss writers—including Robert Hayden, Jean Valentine, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Jos Charles—who use revelatory breaks in idiom, form, and syntax to render with clarity what is too urgent, too momentous, for mere rhetorical speech. Throughout the session, students will participate in intermittent writing exercises and group readings.
Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.
For more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.
This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. After registering, a yellow Resources tab will appear in this section containing a link to join class. Please note that you will need to be logged into view the Resources tab.
Zoom Participation:
In our experience, the intimate nature of a writing workshop benefits from on-camera participation. Students are of course welcome to turn their camera off whenever they need to, but it is a community norm for cameras to be on most of the time. You can learn more about using Zoom here.
Zoom Accessibility:
You can enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to access the transcript after class, please make sure to let your instructor ahead of time that you'd like a copy.