New faces

Some more info on our upcoming HBAOP course

Hello!

There are some new faces here, so I thought I’d give a little intro about the Reading & Writing courses!

Our next course, Reading and Writing Her Body & Other Parties, is a deep dive into Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection. We’ll spend six weeks reading and discussing the stories and their influences, and have writing prompts based on what we’ve read. You can use the prompts to write your own short stories, or to write poetry, non-fiction, or just for freewriting to see what comes up! There’s never any pressure to share your own writing, but there’ll be time at the end of the course for those who do want to. Course numbers are kept purposely small, and they’ve all been incredibly supportive spaces, so sharing is far less scary than it sounds.

Please do bear any content warnings in mind — very broadly, we generally read horror or horror-adjacent works by women, so, for starters, do with that info what you will! CWs are highlighted before the readings for each session, so you’ll have an idea of what you’re getting into. Our Zoom meetings are pretty informal, so if you want to go on mute, turn off your camera, or skip a discussion, that’s no problem. We don’t record the sessions, but notes, links and prompts are all available afterwards.

We’ve already had a body horror course (which included short stories from Heather Parry, Camilla Grudova, and Lesley Nneka Arimah as well as lots more), a Sylvia Plath course (which looked at a selection of her poems, her art, and fitted her work around her life), and we’ve spent six weeks reading Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and writing dark fairytales. Some of those courses might be re-running in 2024 (spoiler alert) so if you’re particularly interested in one, give me a wave. Around those bigger courses, we’ve also had mini-workshops, which usually run on a weekend and are an hour of quick fire prompts on a theme.

Reading and Writing Her Body & Other Parties will be the last course for 2023, running on Zoom on a Monday evening from the 30th of October and finishing up on the 4th December.

Comments are open; if you’ve any questions, fire away!

Terri-Jane x

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