Writing our Historical Moment: Personal Essays and the Political Imagination

with Samina Najmi

Sunday, July 27th, 2025 11AM-1PM Pacific over Zoom
(A recording will be made available to all registrants for a limited period afterwards.)

Do you find yourself overpowered by our political moment? Wanting to make sense of it, asking what your role should be, especially as a writer, and why any of it matters? Do images from near or far linger beyond the headlines, haunting, or asking something of you? What’s happening around you may or may not impact you directly, but if feelings of rage, pain, or powerlessness lurk beneath the placid surface of your day, you’re ready for this generative workshop.

In this creative space, we’ll consider ways to respond to the political, not in journalistic articles, but through the personal essay. Feminists have long held that the personal is political; we see the truth of this claim in all the ways that notions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and ability undergird our political and societal structures. For this workshop, however, we’ll shift the focus slightly to sit with the feminist adage in reverse: the political is personal. Starting with this premise, and drawing inspiration from beloved Palestinian American writer Naomi Shihab Nye, we’ll feel our way through specific political situations that preoccupy us as individuals. We’ll locate them in our bodies and leverage the language available to us to articulate the experience on the page. Surprising connections may emerge, not only between the political and the personal, but between here and there, us and them, activism and art. Imagination has both aesthetic and ethical currents; what worlds open up to us when we tap into that confluence?

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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

$175 Supporter (Note: This amount reflects the “real” value of this course.)

$125 Companion

$75 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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Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic US literatures at California State University, Fresno. Her personal essays, which often engage with the political moment, have appeared in over thirty literary journals. Samina's essay collection, Sing Me a Circle, won the 2024 Aurora Polaris Award in creative nonfiction and is forthcoming from Trio House Press. Daughter of multigenerational displacements, she grew up in Pakistan and England and, since 2006, has called California's Central Valley home. Samina believes in everyone’s three feet of influence, and in the power of language and literature to extend our reach beyond it.