4 Sessions: Saturdays, February 6, 13, 20, and 27
3:00-4:30pm ET
Justin Phillip Reed

Justin Phillip Reed is an American writer, amateur bass guitarist, and the author of the hybrid collection With Bloom Upon Them and Also with Blood: A Horror Miscellany, was released on Halloween 2023 and deemed a “f—ing good time” by Gulf Coast. His preoccupations include horror cinema, ideological failure, and uses of the grotesque. On these subjects, which are central to his writing practice, he has presented craft lectures and scholarship to Bennington College, the University of Houston, Ashland University, and the Watering Hole, and published essays with The Hopkins Review, ANMLY, and the Poetry Foundation. He has also facilitated public workshops for working-class people in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and South Carolina.

This will be a generative, open-genre writing workshop.

We will proceed from these assumptions:
- that writing and editing prescriptions largely concern themselves with cutting out noise, deciding what doesn't belong, and thereby making work marketable/approachable
- that noise—specifically, the inundation of messaging and media—is an irresistible constant of contemporary life, providing a structured context for that life
- that the effort to deny noise and “distraction” is, at best, unpaid labor for a writer or, at worst, a sinful refusal to listen
- that writers who live and work in the belly of empire have a responsibility to reflect and engage the messaging of empire, rather to ignore or transcend it, which is impossible

We will proceed, in the spirit of play, through these weekly practices:
- cinematic and musical ekphrasis, inviting us to collaborate with mass messaging while challenging how we ingest it
- “agit-prompts,” intended to invigorate observation and make good trouble inescapable
- co-creative “deformances,” inspired by Matthea Harvey, that make other people essential to formal and rhetorical devices

We will proceed toward these outcomes:
- genre hybridity / infidelity / hussiness
- an approach to form and context that prioritizes curiosity and discomfort, resisting mastery and placation
- a writing ethic that begins with the interdependence of atrocity and production and issues from there
- new works enlivened by both a vulnerable willingness to absorb and a bratty refusal to sleep

To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Friday, January 29.