Shaping Queer Essays | 8 Weeks | £195

Workshop dates

Starting Wednesday 24th January 2024 and running every Wednesday until Wednesday 13th March 2024.  7pm- 9pm

The Course

Hovering between poetry and prose, the essay is impossible to pin down; vulnerable, transgressive, and often knowingly imperfect, it is sometimes described as an inherently queer form. Join Jessica Wright in a fortnightly workshop exploring approaches to writing queer essays—first, finding your material, and then crafting it into effective forms.

Shaping Queer Essays is an opportunity to get more familiar with the essay, focusing particularly on the idea of ‘shape’ and exploring in depth forms such as hermit crab essays, braided essays, and fragments.

Sessions will involve discussions of pre-reading and generative writing essays. Suggested assignments between sessions will encourage participants to write up to six new essays and to revise one essay prior to the workshop. There will be three opportunities for peer feedback, and each participant will get 1–2 paragraphs of written feedback from Jessica.

Each session will concentrate on a specific approach to the essay:

Session 1 – Micro-prose

Session 2 – Memoir

Session 3 – Obsessions (a.k.a. ‘Research’)

Session 4 – Braided essays

Session 5 – Fragments

Session 6 – Hermit crabs

Session 7 – Revision techniques

Session 8 – Workshop

We will run a course specific Slack platform for sharing work etc.

Partial Bursaries are available for writers who would otherwise be unable to afford to attend. If this is you and you are interested in applying then please email contact@outonthepage.co.uk with some basic details and we'll take it from there.

Minimum Course registrations for this course to go ahead is 5. 

About Jessica

Jessica Wright (she/they) is a writer and educator based in Leeds. Jess has recent publications in Queerlings, Mslexia, streetcake magazine, and Foglifter Journal. They hold a PhD in Classics and often incorporate their research into the history of medicine in antiquity into their creative work. Jess's first book, The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity, came out with the University of California Press in 2022, and they are currently working on a book on the history of psychiatry for Bloomsbury Academic. Their website is here: www.jessica-wright.co.uk. Their erasure poetry and zines can be found on Instagram (@sublunam).