“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson wrote. In this all-genre workshop, we will take inspiration from Dickinson’s poem and tell it queer, approaching language and its joyful possibilities from an angle of queerness. During our weekend, we will read and discuss work by writers who illuminate queer points of view and we will generate new queer writing of our own. Through in-class prompts that build on one another, we will explore queerness not only as subject but as an artistic practice, the very lens through which we envision and release our writing. As we pick up our writing tools—the sounds and shapes of our words, the music of our sentences—we can ask: What makes a setting queer? How about dialogue? What choices does queerness offer our protagonists and poems? Where does our imagination go when we allow queerness to bloom at the very heart of our creativity? 

By writing, reading, and sharing together, we will foster a safe, resonant space to bend our language into an instrument of pleasure, witness, and truth—“The Truth’s superb surprise,” as Dickinson says. 

This workshop is open to all writers. 

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.