Writing the Body
Mondays: August 11 - September 8
7 - 9 p.m. EST
Led by MARGO STEINES
with guest authors Sarah Manguso, Krys Malcolm Belc, Porochista Khakpour, & Christina Cooke
$400
Please register with the email to which you’d like to receive class correspondence and readings.
Death. Illness. Sex. Gender. Athletics. Aging. To write about these embodied experiences and spaces of physical culture, we cannot ignore or reduce the body. We must engage with it on the page, considering its complications and nuances and leaning into them rather than away.
We talk a lot in literary spaces about “writing the body,” but what does this really mean, and how can we practice it at an advanced level? Writing the body is not just writing about the body, but it is also writing about the meaning of the body, and the ways it determines our experiences. How do we occupy our bodies, what do we do with them, how do we feel in them? What is the relationship between the body and the self? What skills, craft tools, literary instincts, and embodied practices can we use to support our body work as writers?
This five-session generative seminar will ask you to consider how your body appears on the page and will equip you with concrete tools to deepen your engagement with body writing of all forms.
In this course, students can expect to:
Hone a set of new craft tools for your own body writing practice
Engage with renowned authors in the body writing canon
Generate new ideas for how to bring the body into your own work
Develop an articulated personal ethic of how to write your own and other bodies
Create new body writing through prompted, in-class writing exercises and guided work to do on your own throughout the week
Join a community of writers deeply engaged in body writing and its challenges
About the Instructors
Margo Steines
Sarah Manguso
Krys Malcolm Belc
Porochista Khakpour
Christina Cooke
-
Margo Steines holds an MFA in non
fiction writing from the University of Arizona, where she is faculty in the Writing Program. Her work was named Notable in Best American Essays and has appeared in The Sun, Off Assignment, The New York Times (Modern Love), Brevity, the anthology Letter to a Stranger, and elsewhere. She is the author of Brutalities (2023), which was named one of the best books of 2023 by Shondaland. -
Sarah Manguso is the author of 10 books, most recently the novel Liars. Her novel Very Cold People was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Wingate Literary Prize, & the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her next book, Questions Without Answers, is forthcoming April 29, 2025. Her nonfiction books include 300 Arguments; Ongoingness; The Guardians; & The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir of her experience with a chronic autoimmune disease. She has also written a story collection, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, and poetry collections Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise, poems from which have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of Best American Poetry. Her essays have appeared in Frieze, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, New York Review of Books, & New York Times Magazine.
-
Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of memoir The Natural Mother of the Child, a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” title and NPR Best Book of 2021, and flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit. His writing on queer and trans family life has been in Harper’s Bazaar, Granta, Guernica, and elsewhere. He is the memoir editor of Split Lip Magazine and the Edelstein-Keller Writer in Residence at the University of Minnesota.
-
Porochista Khakpour is the author of five critically acclaimed books, most recently Tehrangeles, named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, & W Magazine. Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, & a 2007 California Book Award winner. Her widely acclaimed memoir Sick was a Best Book of 2018 in TIME, Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, Autostraddle, The Paris Review, LitHub, & more. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate, Salon, Bookforum, among many others.
-
Christina Cooke is a fiction writer and essayist whose work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, PRISM international, Prairie Schooner, Apogee, Electric Literature, Epiphany, Split Lip, Lambda Literary Review, and others. A MacDowell Fellow and Journey Prize winner, she holds a Master of Arts from the University of New Brunswick, a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was named the inaugural Poets & Writers Fellow at Vermont Studio Center. Broughtupsy (2025) is her debut novel.
Class Schedule
We'll be joined by guest authors Sarah Manguso on August 11; Krys Malcolm Belc on August 18; Porochista Khakpour on August 25; and Christina Cooke on September 1.
Details
This course will take place on Zoom on Mondays August 11 - September 8 from 7 - 9 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 $400; a limited number of scholarships are available.
A limited number of scholarships for this course are available. Please fill out this form by July 21, and we’ll get back to you within a week after the deadline.
Off Assignment’s Masters’ Series courses are unique five-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.