On Whales, Narwhals, and Writing

Generative Interspecies Writing with Janice Lee and Lidia Yuknavitch

Sunday, April 20th 12-3pm Pacific via Zoom

(A recording will be made available to all registrants for a limited period afterwards.)

Whales have been around much longer than us and they know more than we do. What might we learn in creative and meditative practice alongside whale ways of knowing and being? What writing forms emerge and recede? How can we explore perceptional and storytelling shape shifting? What can we learn from creatures who navigate both water and air, as we do, before the breach? How does whale breathing and sleeping show us different ways to inhabit our bodies, our imaginations, and our own writing? What questions emerge when we listen to whalesong that might show us something about our own creativity? And this: YES NARWHALS EXIST; how might we consider the Narwhal as a creature existing in both the real world and myth? 

In this generative writing session we will use encounters with whales as a generative space of writing possibilities. Portals, writing, and a bit of shared work. All forms of writing.

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.

$275 Partner

$225 Supporter (Note: This amount reflects the “real” value of this course.)

$175 Companion

$150 Friend

A limited number of scholarships are also 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.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the short story collection Verge (Riverhead Books), the novels The Book of Joan (Harper Books), The Small Backs of Children (Harper Books), and Dora: A Headcase (Hawthorne Books), and the anti-memoir The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books). Her TED Talk "On the Beauty of Being a Misfit" has received over 3 million views, and spawned The Misfit Manifesto (TED Books/Simon and Schuster). She lives and collaborates in Portland, Oregon at Corporeal Writing. She is a very good swimmer.

Janice Lee (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 8 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry, most recently Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023). She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, bringing together elements from several different lineages as a mesa-carrying practitioner of the Q’ero tradition of medicine work and as a practitioner of Zen Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh). She also incorporates elements of ancestral healing, Korean shamanic ritual (Muism), plant medicine & flower essence work, card readings & divination, and interspecies communication. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. She can be found online at http://janicel.com and Twitter/Instagram: @diddioz.