Today is the Friday before a holiday week, a day when emails are irrelevant to us all, and I have a sidewalk to shovel and mouse tracks to go find in the snowy park by the river, so I’ll keep this brief:
I’m teaching a writing class in January and I want you to know about it before all the spots are gone!
The quick and dirty details:
4 weeks, 1.5 hour classes, on Zoom
Class options are Sundays Jan 12-Feb 2 at 2-3:30pm CST OR Wednesdays Jan 15-Feb 5 at 7:30-9pm CST
Sliding scale $99-$150 (paid Substack members get deeper discounts, if that’s you and you wanna sign up send me an email)
Generative prompts, great reading/watching/listening lists, lifetime access to recordings and class materials, and Zoom class hangs
A community of people all trying, failing, listening, noticing, dreaming, and making
What’s the class about?
You guessed it: diaries.
I admit that I am a diary believer. I’ve kept a diary since I was 6, I’ve been studying works of diary my whole life, and I’ve been teaching diaries in writing classes for almost a decade. I truly believe that diaries are some of the most radical, hopeful, important acts of resistance we can make — and that their reputation for being too feminine, too weak, too non-productive, and too boring proves just how important they are. The person I am today would never have emerged without the diaries I’ve kept and witnessed.
So for 4 weeks, we’re gonna make our own diaries as we pay attention to, discuss, and seek out diaries of all kinds. Keeping a diary of any kind is hard and thrilling and annoying and full of revelations, and we’re gonna go through it together.
A few of the diaries we’ll look at:
St Agnes Blannbekin’s horny nun diaries
The Dear America books (truly powerful for the millennials among us)
Lou Sullivan’s diaries as arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition
Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s diary-film “This Is Not A Film”
The AIDS Memorial Quilt
The omitted pages from Anne Frank’s diaries
Queering the Map, a Google map archive project documenting queer lives in Gaza
TikTok and its impending US ban
Newsletters as diaries
Who is this class for?
If you’re trying to write music, poems, Substacks or newsletters, emails, social media content... make new friends and ask big questions and try something hard and rewarding... learn more about who you are and what you can do… carve out intentional space for an art practice, start your new year off with intention, feel more hopeful, or even just have a reason to sit down once a week in a virtual room with other people who care: I think this is gonna be a really great way to do all that.
The last time I taught this class was right as the pandemic began in 2020, and I’ve never forgotten it. The conversations we had about vulnerability, finding our voice, resisting oppressive forces, and teaching ourselves that our lives, thoughts, and emotions are not frivolous — are, in fact, worth documenting and remembering — led to folks making diary projects that stick with me today. I’m so, so excited to be teaching this again, 5 years later.
Read more about the class here, and feel free to email me with any questions, especially if you need a lower cost spot than you see.
Okay, that’s all for me today! I’m off to go track some field mice in the snow! I hope you’re keeping warm, keeping heart, and keeping your boss on read!
XOXO, C