Tongues and Languages

with Jenna Tang
a 6-week online workshop starting January 9th, 2025

Everyone has a journey with their own language/s. It could be our experiences living or traveling across countries, immigrant stories, learning a new language, and how languages can be defined beyond what it conventionally is––what’s our relationship with our body language? What does language mean to us? Languages are ways we see this world, and it is especially important that we write about our relationship with them, bringing the stories that are meaningful to us out in the world.

So how do we write about our personal journeys with languages? How do we let people see that understanding our stories about languages really matters?

In this six-week writing workshop, we’ll be exploring different forms of writings that are centering around body, languages, translation, and immigration. We’ll read works from writers who are multilingual or have written about their relationships with their languages. We’ll also discuss politics that circle around preserving dialects, disappearing languages, accents, translation, and how to make these topics more visible. We’ll be writing together in our class, reading closely and critically, and discussing what we can do to make our voices heard.

Possible readings include works from Mariana Enríquez, Mirene Arsanios, Sawako Nakayasu, Sulaiman Addonia, Anton Hur, Kaiama L. Glover, Silvia Aguilar-Zéleny, and more.

This workshop aims to build a safe space without judgments or assumptions. While we work on our writings, we’ll be exploring resources that help us gain inspiration and enjoy our writing process. The workshop will address how to pitch our works, as well as how to take care of ourselves when writing about trauma, vulnerabilities, and more.

Course Outline: 

Week 1: Introduction: Writing About Our Languages
Week 2: Languages, Politics, and Translation
Week 3: Lyrical/ Personal Essays About Languages/ Writing About Our Bodies
Week 4: Travel, Music, and Languages
Week 5: Writing About Dialects and Disappearing Languages
Week 6: Writing About Diaspora and Languages + Pitching Our Own Works

STRUCTURE: Jenna will host six weekly live Zoom meetings on Thursdays from 6-8pm Pacific. Meeting dates: 1/9, 1/16, 1/23, 1/30, 2/6, 2/13. All Zoom meetings will be recorded and made available for 30 days afterwards, if you need to miss one.

TEACHER: Jenna Tang

COST: $350 (Payment plans always available—please contact Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com)

SCHOLARSHIPS: Two full scholarships are available. 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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Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese writer, educator, and translator who translates between Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French, and English. She is a board member and chair of the Equity Advocates Committee at the American Literary Translators Association . Her translations and essays are published in McSweeney’s, Lit Hub, The Paris Review, Latin American Literature Today, World Literature Today, Catapult, AAWW, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Her translations include Taiwanese feminist author Taiwan’s most iconic #MeToo movement title, Lin Yi-Han’s novel, Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise (HarperVia).

Testimonials:
K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary
"Jenna Tang is doing incredible and important work as a translator and writer. She is so generous and always opens the door for others. Her work challenges the status quo and creates a space for resonant stories and writers to find many audiences and communities across languages and borders. She helps us see what is possible in the literary world and how to find our way toward it. I can't think of anyone I'd rather learn from more!"

Jeremy Tiang, Literary Translator and Singaporean Writer
“Jenna Tang works tirelessly and generously to promote literature in translation and to build community within the translation sphere. As a translator from Taiwan now based in the US, she moves fluidly between the cultures she translates from and to, probing the bounds of the English language and seeking out voices who have hitherto not received sufficient attention.”

Mike Fu, Literary Translator of Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara
“Jenna is a thoughtful translator and creative spirit who works from multiple lineages and myriad inspirations, toggling between the minutest of details and big-picture issues in a text with ease. Warm and inquisitive, she's committed to community in all senses and brings passion and energy to every one of her endeavors.”

Nadia Bongo, Writer & Poet
"Jenna is a fantastic instructor! Her workshop was so engaging. She expertly mixed questions of languages, poetic, inspiration, and translation. That’s something I had been looking for a long time in a workshop. I learned new tools to write about languages. Jenna’s constructive feedback encouraged me to keep writing about languages and exploring migration in organic ways. The discussions resonated throughout my week outside the online meeting: I kept feeling engaged, researching, and writing."