Workshops

Surrealist Poetic Forms

Six-week online writing workshop: Jan/Feb 2025

I’ve always liked a good form, a recognizable container to fill with strangeness. In my writing process the parameters & constraints a form provides give the surrealist stuff a graspability, a counter to the surreal’s attempts to flee from sense. This workshop will gather a handful of people to play with surrealist forms, exploring their uses & misuses, writing in received forms & inventing new traditions of the surreal, dreamlike, uncanny, unknowable, & untamable.

This workshop will have two acts:

• First two weeks: We will first read & discuss other writer’s uses of form & the surreal, writing into those received forms & discussing the output. We will touch on work by writers such as Danielle Vogel, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortazar, Lorine Niedecker, Yi Sang, Brynja Hjálmsdóttir, Harryette Mullen, & Edmond Jabès, among others. I’ll provide copies of all readings to discuss.

• Final four weeks: We will each devise a new surrealist form & all the participants will write into these forms. We’ll share what comes from these writings, to better expand & understand the uses & effects of these novel forms.

I’ll be leading two separate sessions of this workshop:

• Group One [FULL]: Sundays in Jan & Feb, 1/12-2/16, 7-9pm EST

• Group Two: Tuesdays 1/14-2/18: 7-9pm EST

These workshops both cap at eight participants & will occur in the æther of Zoom.

How much: Sliding scale from $0-300, whatever makes sense to you. My vnmo is Mathias-Svalina, pypal is MathiasSvalina

To register: email mathias.svalina at gmail & I’ll follow up with more info & a first zoom link