Register here by June 30!
This workshop will take place in person at The Knowledge Workshop office in Furn el Chebbak on July 4 and 6 from 4:30-7:30 (see below for details; exact location will be provided to participants).
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Writing is a labor of love, a chosen form of expression the writer is expected to sustain through other forms of income. This workshop explores the fraught, co-dependent relationship between paid work (teaching, editing, tutoring, etc.) and non-compensated creative work.
From our subjective positions, we will discuss and write about the various relationships between money, work, and literature and question the nature of love in said labor: how does the self-sacrificing ethos and vocational rhetoric of creative work ultimately perpetuate exploitative structures? What environment or conditions would allow our creative selves to truly thrive?
Together we will read authors such as Anne Carson, Simone White, Roberto Bolaño, Bernadette Meyer, and Olga Ravn—work that exposes material conditions that are traditionally kept invisible in literature. What happens when the work becomes precisely about the economy that enables (or prevents) writing to exist in the first place?
We will write, discuss, and speculate about other forms of economies and experiment with writing that reflects the conditions of possibility of its own existence.
Participants may write in the language of their choice, but please note that the workshop and feedback will be conducted in English.
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Workshop includes:
1) Readings and prompts
2) Two 3-hour in-person group sessions
3) Feedback on individual work
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Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2019), and more recently, The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing.
She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
