Description

This two-hour workshop will be divided into two portions.

In the first, you’ll be led through the prose poem’s entanglement with the surreal, considering: hyper discourse or poetic leaping; narrative; syntactic oddity, obsession, and wordplay; and finally, silliness. In this half of the workshop, participants will complete four independent automatic writing exercises correlating to the prose poem’s constituent parts.

The workshop’s second half will be devoted entirely to a large-scale game of exquisite corpse. Traditionally played line by line, our game will be completed through fast-paced and repeated intervals of automatic writing.

By the workshop’s end, you will have written no fewer than ten new pieces.

As a participant, you will receive:

• An approximately one-hour discussion of the surreal prose poem, its elements, and its contemporary practitioners.
• A reading list on the surreal prose poem, including authors and works not discussed within the workshop.
• A generative and guided workshop resulting in the creation of 10+ new pieces of writing.
• A collection of prompts and automatic writing tips.
• Access to all exquisite corpses produced during our session.

Evan Williams is a Chicago-based prose poet interested in the intersection between surrealism and Queerness, especially where it involves gender. Since 2019, they’ve maintained an automatic writing practice, often rising briefly at 3:30am to put down first drafts. Their work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Pleiades, Passages North, Joyland, and Columbia Poetry Review, among others, and has been anthologized in Best Microfiction 2021 and Best Microfiction 2023.

Evan can be contacted through their website, or found on Twitter @evansquilliams.