RESHELVE ME
fall 2025
workshops & classes
COMING/GOING: Arrival & Departure in Science Fiction
Tuesdays, Sept 23 - Oct 28, 2025
On Zoom | 5-7PM PST
cost: $200, $300, or $400 (sliding scale, you decide)
one free spot available
Description
How do you tell if you’re coming or going? Direction? Gravity? Language? What do leaving and arrival have to tell us? What do they communicate about a people, a world, a culture? This class will bring a critical eye to the multivarious departures and arrivals that pepper science fiction, and that are a hallmark of the genre as it’s been written so far. We’ll pick apart disastrous launches, failed landings, moments of touchdown and contact which forever change the worlds and lives they intersected. We’ll ask questions such as: when you leave a place, what do you carry with you? How does the fantasy of a new world cloud the vision of the newly arrived? And what of the voyage in between; whether in cryosleep or the Middle Passage, can the in between ever really be said to be over? Our focus will be on science fiction’s comings and goings, but our metaphors and their ramifications range broadly through time, geographies, and histories. Arrival and departure are unique windows through which to examine more closely the following: translation, transportation, technology, memory and archives, migration, indigeneity, and the vast movements and motions of our time. A class for those who want to read and write in motion.
Waste Books
Alternating Thursdays, Sept 18 - Dec 11, 2025
w/ optional unstructured group writing time on opposite weeks
On Zoom | 5-7PM PST
cost: $400, $500, or $600 (sliding scale, you decide)
one free spot available
Description
Can a book be written in the negative? Made out of things thrown away? Cast off thoughts, paragraphs edited out of longer work that you’re unwilling to relegate to the waste bin? Is it possible that that which we consider pointless or unbalanced is actually the concentrated life force of our voice? In this class, students will read waste books from past and present, while working on their own in a supportive community of writers. We will rescue fragments, treasure the scraps, and look at those irregular trimming in a new light. An effort will be made to read new narratives in these waste-full assemblages, while remaining loose in our treatment of the resulting book as a (w)hole product or package. Occasional prompts will be provided, but their focus will not be generative but recombinant. We’ll edit and digest, cut and rearrange.
For anyone seeking new forms and new possibilities in the stories they’ve been telling (both to others and to themselves). Reading will primarily center waste books in the nonfiction tradition, but all writers of prose are welcome, including the genreless. Be ready to entertain esoteric questions like: What is the relationship between waste books and the literary marketplace? The waste of modern capitalism? What new value can the waste book illuminate in your writing practice? Regardless of whether you aim to publish or keep your waste book to yourself, this class will reorient you toward a new value paradigm in your writing.
Reading List
This is a list of books we will read in whole or in large chunks, and which students should make an effort to procure from their library or local bookstore:
The Waste Books, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (selections)
To After That, Renee Gladman
In the Heart of The Heart of Another Country, Etel Adnan
The Freezer Door, Matilda Bernstein Sycamore
Deposits, Sliding Scale & Payment Info
(This is my personal payment policy. Classes in collaboration with other organizations will follow the policy of said org.)
Unless otherwise noted, a $100 deposit is required to hold your space. Payment plans are available upon request.
Deposits are not refundable, but I will apply them to a future class if you can't attend the series you signed up for.
In other words, be sure you're ready to do this before paying me $$$.
If a class lists the cost as a range (i.e. $100-300), then I trust you to be able to select the payment level that best suits your current financial situation.
Sometimes I'm able to offer a spot in a class free of charge. I will list below the class title if one of these spots is available. These spots are reserved for those who can't afford to pay but who are at a stage in their writing/lives where they believe they would benefit from some instruction. Just tell me a little about yourself, how you learned about the class, and I'll let you know if the spot is available or add you to a waitlist.