Writing the Everyday

Description

This seven-week course takes everyday life as an abundant field of study. Following the rhythms of work, leisure, the body, technology, desire and play, we’ll explore various approaches to writing the daily. What forms of ‘extreme attention’ (CAConrad) can writing access, and to what effect? How do we break, queer, slow or sabotage time? What kind of writing could hold, shrink or expand the day? We’ll read a range of contemporary experiments in the quotidian and engage with journaling, poetry and hybrid writing.

Open to writers of all backgrounds and practice. This course is for anyone interested in exploring everyday life in their writing, reflecting critically on the poetics and politics of daily writing and encountering literary issues of time, intimacy, objects, environment and the body. Extracts from all texts will be supplied on a shared Google Drive and linked through Experimental Creatives Collective.

Here’s a breakdown of the course structure:

Week 1 February 24th: Today

Exploring ‘today’ as a unit of experience in writing, rhythms of repetition, return. What do we mean by an aesthetics of ‘everydayness’? How does literature encounter everyday life — its things, feelings, tempos, bodies and motions — in form and content?

Week 2 March 3rd: Work

In what ways can we explore the rhythms and demands of work, and make space for play and dream? In what ways is writing a form of work? How can our writing critique the conditions of labour which variously structure our daily lives? What kinds of interval, escape and resistance might it offer?

Week 3 March 10th: Ritual Attention

How can we practice forms of attention that estrange us from the familiarities of daily and domestic life? What forms of collage and screenshot experiments help us make sense of the chaos of daily life under late capitalism?

Week 4* Tuesday March 14th: Consumerism and Desire

What are the political and poetic potentials of our everyday desires? How can we think beyond the desires of capitalism? What is the significance of gender and sexuality within daily life, and how is this negotiated through consumption?

*please note this class will take place on Tuesday 14th March not Thursday

Week 5 March 24th: Technology and the Post-Internet

What is the relationship between writing and technology in our daily lives? How does experimental writing explore, and intervene in, the forms, genres and platforms of Web 2.0 — from social media to texting and digital objects/systems? What are the everyday politics and poetics of the internet and its various temporalities of labour, desire, data, communication and self-presentation?

Week 6 March 31st: Sick Time

How can writing explore personal and societal experiences with sickness, from chronic illness to pandemics? How does illness alter our sense of time, space, work and embodiment; how does it change our sense of the ‘day’?

Week 7 April 7th: Rest and Dreams

What forms of rest and relaxation can writing offer? What is the relationship between writing and dreaming, and how can dreaming help us imagine better worlds, or access hidden portals in writing? What are the politics of rest and how might we pursue it through creative practice?

Week 8 April 14th: Optional Open Mic

Period	Feb 2022 → Apr 2022
Event type	Workshop