The Course

Wondrous Strange: Writing in Celebration of the Queerly More-than-Human

The more-than-human world is stranger, wilder, more inventive and exploratory than our bipedal, oxygen-breathing, K-selected lives could ever be.  Honestly, it’s often pretty queer, in the sense that it defies human ideas of what life “should” look like and thrives in splendiferous other ways. Slime molds, for example, have hundreds of sexes; many marine animals change sexes over the course of their lives; oxygen isn’t necessary to life, say the chemoautotrophs of the deep-sea hydrothermal vents. How can our poems channel that rambunctious, otherly energy in their forms, tone, and approach?  What if we step back and look at our own human perspectives and dramatize them as utterly bizarre?  Look: we know things are bad, ecologically.  Rather than sink into despair, let’s find ways to celebrate the ridiculous (both human and more-than-human), to dramatize utterly otherly ways of being, to decenter the conventionally human and embrace the other. In this workshop, we’ll read and discuss poems, respond to generative prompts, and offer supportive feedback in a workshop setting. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry will be our primary text, and we’ll leap from there. Come be weird with us.

Duration: This class meets over six consecutive Sundays from 12-3 pm ET (9-12 am PT) from October 15 through November 19.

Application window: September 1-15, 2023.

The Instructor

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Toward Antarctica and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro, and she has coedited the anthologies Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005–2020, and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, and Orion, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. Based on Cape Cod, Liz works as a naturalist, teaches at Brandeis University, and runs Broadsided Press.