Decentering the Human: On hearing the voices of the natural world

A generative workshop with Talia Kolluri

Friday January 24th, 2025 10AM—1PM Pacific over Zoom
(A recording will be made available to all registrants for a limited period afterwards.)

 “Every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world." — Ed Yong, An Immense World

Every day, as we move through the motions of our lives and make our way through the waking world, we share our spaces with an uncountable number of other life forms. Often, they go unnoticed or are pushed to the margins of the stories we tell about our lives. But if we reframe our stories to place non-human actors at the center, what kinds of narratives emerge? What do we see in ourselves and in other forms of life when we perceive them through other senses?

In this generative workshop, we will consider the Umwelt, or universe of sense perceptions, of other living things, and we will expand our understanding of animal and plant cognition and communication. With this expanded understanding, we will experiment with how to write from non-human perspectives and incorporate non-human sense perceptions into our narratives. We will learn techniques for how to approximate our understanding of other umwelts and will learn how inviting non-human perspectives into our writing enriches our work.

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Pricing:

The following payment model is inspired by and borrowed from the payment model of Bayo Akomolafe’s class, We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks.

This workshop offers a sliding scale based on your relative financial standing. In an effort to reflect disparity in economic condition and access to wealth, the following payment system is designed for those with more wealth to help cover the costs of those with less access to wealth and resources. We trust your discernment of your current financial situation and how you fit into the global economic context.

As you decide what amount to pay, please consider your present-day financial situation governed by income, but also the following factors: historical discrimination faced by your peoples; your financial wealth (retirement/savings/investments); your access to income and financial wealth, both current and anticipated (how easily could you earn more income compared to other people in your community, country, and the world; are you expecting an inheritance); people counting on your financial livelihood including dependents and community members; the socio-economic conditions of your locale (relative to other places in your country and in the world); your relationship to food & resource scarcity.

$250 Partner

$200 Supporter (Note: This amount reflects the “real” value of this course.)

$150 Companion

$100 Friend

Scholarships are also still available for anyone needing further financial assistance. Please email Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com for more info, or if you are feeling challenged in any way by the financial requirements of participation.

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Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer from Northern California. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House 2022), was a finalist for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the 2023 Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2023 Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and was selected as a 2023 ALA RUSA Notable Book. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of literary journals and she has taught generative workshops on the natural world across multiple formats. A lifelong Californian, Talia lives in the Central Valley with her husband and two cats.