Taught online via Zoom

July 18 - August 22, 2024
7 - 9 pm New York ET
$185 Paid Patreon Members / $195 General Admission

Please note: All classes will be recorded for those unable to attend

Formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, the members of Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle ~ Workshop for Potential Literature) found inspiration at the intersection of creative constraints and the total freedom to break form. This course offers generative writing exercises designed to free the mind and creative spirit so that we may shape and release new and unexpected literary creatures.

We’ll explore a range of Oulipian experiments and other hybrid and constrained forms with a spirit of experimentation Through readings and in-class generative prompts. Attendees will leave this hands-on course with a portfolio of new starts that include hybrid texts, lipograms, ekphrastic writing, “found” texts, concrete poems, and other constraint-based writing.

As a collective, we will drink mightily from Oulipo’s spirit of playful postures and endless outcomes to create the strange, the haunted, and the inspired. Together we will become, as Queneau described, “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”

In-class writing exercises offer a range of productive constraints for writers to respond to creatively. Writers will be encouraged to follow their individual obsessions and interests in subject matter, and to write in whatever genre or modality they wish.

Course Goals:

• Expand our powers of creative expression through experimentation.

• Relate personal interests/experience to cultural, historic, scientific, and artistic phenomena of the past and present.

• Generate textual artifacts connected to a sense of joy in making.

• Access wellsprings of creativity and imagination, clear blocks through experimentation and play, develop confidence, and take artistic risks.

• Share the work we create with each other and build creative community.

Class Format:

In this generative course, we will engage in creative exercises using in-class prompts that can be further developed and revised at home. While this is not a critique or workshop, we will share writing and support each other’s learning in each session. 

Weekly Themes:

• Week 1 - Invoking Oulipo: Welcome, introductions, beginning history of Oulipo; S+7.

• Week 2 - Hauntings & Echoes: Snowballs, slenderizing, anaphora.

• Week 3 - The Uncanny: Lipograms, “found” texts, mirror poems.

• Week 4 - Beasts & Chimeras: Ekphrastic writing, centos, tautograms, concrete poems.

• Week 5 - Ritual & Symmetry: Stiles, sestinas, contrapuntal texts.

• Week 6 - Strange Meetings: Hybrids and zuihitsu.

Your guide through this world is writer, editor, and transdisciplinary literary artist Gabriela Denise Frank, a friend of Morbid Anatomy who hails from the Pacific Northwest. Trained in visual design, music, religious studies, and writing, Gabriela is drawn to the architectural forms, motions, and products of ritual as a part of her creative practice. A devout student of constraints and experimental forms, she is determined to help other artists embrace the hybrid, the imaginative, and the ceremonial in their work—and delight in the radical vulnerability of making weird, wonderful shit that can’t be easily categorized.