All Columns Letter to a Stranger No Equivalent What I Didn’t Say Under the Influence Witching Hour Goodbye to That Place
A penchant for journeys and a fascination with strangers
 
 

Writing Your Queerness

Mondays: April 6-27
7 - 9:30 p.m. EST

Led by JOSS LAKE
with guest authors Benedict Nguyễn, Andrea Lawlor, Zefyr Lisowski, and Denne Michele Norris

$420 ($370 until Feb 16)

Please register with the email to which you’d like to receive class correspondence and readings.

As queer writers, we are often writing against normative narratives…So, what do we want to write towards? What are the constricting stories and expectations that we can release to forge our own queer literary paths? How do we write in alignment with our own power, experience, and desire? How do we resource the queer imagination to create our stories?

In “Writing Your Queerness,” we will identify tropes and flattening narratives that hold us back, and examine techniques and strategies towards empowerment on the page. We’ll explore how we can use our own lived experience in our fiction and non-fiction, getting at the texture of our own queer communities and relationships. We’ll look at forces that work on the queer imagination, including elements of myth, horror, and fantasy, and how to weave them into literary fiction. And we’ll dive into bringing queer relationships onto the page in their messiness and eros. The course is an invitation to step into your authenticity as a queer writer.

In this four-week generative seminar, we will embrace the specificity and possibility of our queerness. Joined by esteemed writers Benedict Nguyễn, Andrea Lawlor, Zefyr Lisowski, and Denne Michele Norris, we’ll learn different strategies for both putting our queerness on the page and for continuing to write through times of political repression. We’ll also discuss practices for dislodging feelings of shame or inadequacy and fostering liberation within and beyond our writing. Through “Writing Your Queerness,” we’ll orient our writing towards our joys, our fears, our messiness, our humor, our desires, our bodies, and our potent possibilities.

In this course, students can expect to:

  • Develop craft tools for writing compellingly about elements of their queer lives

  • Interrogate feelings of shame or self-doubt around writing their own queerness

  • Hear from queer writers who are forging their own paths in the literary world

  • Deepen their own writing practice and take risks around expressing the messy, the vulnerable, and the empowered aspects of queerness

  • Generate to weekly writing assignments (think: writing related to dating app encounters, the party of your dreams, queer jealousy, the enemies-to-lovers trope, etc.)

This is not a workshop course—there’s no peer feedback—but you’ll generate plenty of new material through customized prompts and weekly assignments.

About the Instructors

 

Joss Lake

 
 

Andrea Lawlor

Denne Michele Norris

Zefyr Lisowski

Benedict Nguyễn

 

Details

This course will take place on Zoom on Mondays from April 6 - April 27 from 7 - 9:30 p.m. EST. Participants will receive a Zoom link prior to the course as well as a recording of the course afterward.

After you take a course with Off Assignment, you’ll be invited into our private writing community for alumni on Slack. It includes channels for publication opportunities, reading recommendations, meet-ups, and more—not to mention literary companionship that outlasts the course itself.

There is a 10% cancellation fee if you cancel your enrollment more than 1 week before the start of the course. No refund will be given if cancelling within less than a week of the course start date (or after the course has begun).

Please email courses@offassignment.com with any questions.

FAQs →

Financial Aid

The full price for this course is $420, with early bird pricing at $370 available until February 16. Payment plans are available at checkout via ShopPay.

A limited number of scholarships for this course are available. Please fill out this form by February 23, and we’ll get back to you within a week after the deadline. (Please hold off on registering until you have received a scholarship decision.)

 
 

Off Assignment’s Masters’ Series courses are unique four-session courses that delve deep into a specific writing topic by harnessing the expertise and craft tactics of a renowned writer in a particular niche, plus four celebrated authors. Participating writers gain a wealth of advanced techniques while benefiting from a cohesive community of disciplined writers.