1 Session: Saturday, June 15
1:00-5:15pm ET (break included)
Andrea Lawlor

Andrea Lawlor is the author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, originally published by Rescue Press in 2017, and reissued by Vintage/Knopf in 2019. A 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards, Kirkus Reviews called it, “groundbreaking,” and the Los Angeles Review of Books found it “intoxicatingly rousing.”

What makes writing queer and/or trans, anyway? The writer? The content? The form? I’ve found the more useful question for writers is, what are specifically queer & trans modes of writing? How can we see these modes in action across genres? How can we identify and learn from camp, for instance, or the coming out story, or queer fabulism, or trans eco-poetics? What can queer and trans texts teach us about narrative, about how to write bodies, sex, death, the future? 

In this half-day multi-genre intensive, we’ll investigate queer and trans texts in order to produce our own. I’ll share some of what I’ve been noticing, propose some queer/trans modes of writing, offer prompts that build from the work we discuss, and make time for you to write. Most of our work together will be generative and community-building; there is no workshop component but there will be opportunities to share your work. 

I’ll send a reading list after registration, which will include 1-2 books, as well as links and pdfs. Reading the work we’ll discuss is recommended but definitely not required! 

Note: We will all respectfully hold space for everyone's possible trans-ness/queerness, while also assuming that all writers can learn from the work of queer/trans writers (to paraphrase the poet Trace Peterson).

Full and partial scholarships available. For information, please contact Kate Mabus, kate@theshipmanagency.com