week 1: EPISTOLARY WRITING

With a focus on the lost art of the long ass email, we will explore the advantages of employing epistolary literature to tell a story and consider how writing towards an audience of one can invoke a universal interest. We’ll read (often posthumously published) letters and emails by writers like Kathy Acker, Rainer Maria Rilke and Pierre Bergé and discuss the evolution of our own correspondences over time.

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week 2: MANIFESTOS

What are you actually trying to achieve in your writing right now? We’ll look at the various purposes of artists' manifestos and consider the role of the writer in contemporary society. Do we have ‘a duty to reflect the times’ as Nina Simone once said? (Is that inevitable?) Or can we do just whatever we want? We’ll consider manifestos by writers like Frank O’Hara, Henning Lundkvist and Virginia Woolf, and talk about trends in literature relative to our ever shifting cultural landscape, trying to figure out how best to simultaneously embrace and resist the outside noise.

 

week 3: FOOD WRITING

You’re hungry. You make a meal. Or maybe you go out and pay for one. But there’s always a little story. Food tells us so much, about culture, about class, about co-dependence with the society we live in. And yet most of the literature we read related to it comes in the form of insanely long introductions to recipes we read by random people on the internet. We’ll read food writing by authors like Alice B. Toklas, MFK Fisher, and Nina Mingya Powles, and talk about our relationships to grocery shopping, cooking and feeding our friends and families. And then we’ll turn that all into a little literature.

 

week 4: TRAVELOGUES

So you went on a journey and learned something about yourself? Or observed the world around you from a new perspective? That’s cool. In this session we’re going to talk about the long history of travelogues, from Herodotus to YouTube vloggers, and discuss different available methods to tell the story of a voyage, whether it’s a trip to the supermarket, a walk across the country, or a flight to a foreign land. We’ll read writing from the ~Profound Experience of Earth archives and discuss how we respond to feeling totally out of context. And then, of course, we’ll write about it.

 

week 5: FOREWORDS, AFTERWORDS & TRANSLATOR's NOTES

What’s going on with those forewords that spoil the whole plot of the novel before you’ve started reading it? What can we learn from an afterword written years later by an author who clearly wants to distance themselves from the original work? Do we secretly enjoy these additional parts of the book more than the actual text? Or is there, in fact, no such distinction? In this meeting, we’ll discuss the potential for creativity and collaboration with regard to the front and back matter of our favourite books, and apply it to our own writing.

 

week 6: EDITING

After all of this writing, we ought to spend some time thinking about editing it. How can we polish the pieces we’ve worked on? And how can we put them together to form a collection? What are the themes of the zine/books we’ve been building? And what’s missing? We’ll harness the power of the Zine Writing Club to give everyone a sense of where they might go from here, addressing complicated topics such as structure, as well as the sometimes simpler (and more fun) details, like titles, epigraphs and acknowledgments. We’ll discuss books of collected writing that we admire and give ourselves small writing goals for the summer.